Wrong.

There are certain uses for YouTube, but it also comes with substantial risk. In fact, there are some kinds of videos that absolutely don’t belong on YouTube, under any circumstances and if you run an online business, you need to know about this.

Read on to learn about the risks of using YouTube and discover exactly what kinds of videos do and don’t belong on YouTube.

The YouTube Risk Factor

During our recent web clinic webinar we spoke briefly about some of the benefits and drawbacks of using YouTube as your video hosting platform. This caused quite a flurry of questions and so we thought that it was worthy of a post by itself.

The first point that needs to be addressed is the risk associated with hosting your videos on YouTube. Unfortunately, I know about this first hand, since my largest YT account was banned some time ago.

Without going into too much detail, here’s what happened:

• The account was over a year old.
• It contained 115 original videos, no copyright violations and completely TOS compliant.
• It had more than 1,000 subscribers, who actively participated with comments, likes etc.
• It was banned without warning, without explanation and without chance for recourse, from one moment to the next.

There are a lot of spammers on YouTube. Some of them using bots to download and re-upload other people’s videos, some participating in comment spamming and much more. Because of this, I estimate that hundreds, or even thousands of accounts are banned on YouTube, every day.

However, even a completely legitimate account can be wiped out, for no discernible reason.

This brings us to rule number 1:

Never put any video on YouTube, that you can’t afford to lose.

I’ve received far too many messages from people who’ve experienced the same thing as me: they had a real, legitimate and non-spammy account and had it banned for no reason. Rule number one is not trivial.

And it gets worse: your videos and your account always need to be compliant with YouTube’s terms and rules. However, those rules can change at any time. Even if all your videos are TOS compliant right now, the TOS can change over night and your account can get whacked because it’s no longer compliant with the new rules that were just created. Google (the owner of YouTube) is notorious for doing exactly this, with many of their services.

Essentially, you don’t really have any rights to any videos you upload to YouTube.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

There are some advantages to uploading videos to YouTube. The most obvious one being that it’s free to use.

In addition, the platform brings a certain traffic potential with it, especially since it’s often used much like a search engine. Your YouTube-internal rankings are based on the number of views, number of likes, ratio of likes to dislikes, keywords in the video title, description and tags and good old backlinks to the video. Get these factors optimized and you can have a video appear in the search results on YouTube, as well as in “related video” sections for other videos.

Another advantage is that it’s sometimes easier to get a YouTube video ranked in Google search results, than getting a page from your own site ranked. This is because A) YouTube belongs to Google (and Google likes to promote Google) and B) domain authority is a very strong ranking factor in Google.

Unfortunately, there are also some serious drawbacks to YouTube, even apart from the sudden-account-death risk.  One of them is the video quality, which isn’t terrible, but also isn’t thrilling, on YouTube. This is especially true for screencast-type videos.

Apart from that, there’s also a branding problem: YouTube is interested in promoting YouTube. They are never interested in promoting you, your content or your website/business. Every YouTube video contains YT branding, links back to YT, links to YT social options and links to related videos, even if you embed them on your own site. This can partially be fixed (more on that later).

Take the above, combined with the risk of losing your account and the conclusion is that you don’t have much control over your YouTube videos. A video on YouTube is like an asset that you don’t own or control and that’s never a good thing.

What Does and Doesn’t Belong on YouTube

Here are the types of videos that belong on YouTube:

• Anything private and completely non-commercial. E.g. a vacation video you want to share with your friends, which has absolutely nothing to do with your business.
• If you’re on a budget: things like “casual” videos you add to your blog and videos that don’t directly have a conversion goal.
• Viralbait: videos that have the express purpose of going viral, through the YouTube social media elements. This would be part of brand marketing.

And here are the kinds of videos that do not belong on YouTube:

• Any business related video that has a direct conversion goal (e.g. a sales video).
• Any video you place on a page with a direct conversion goal, like a video testimonial on a sales-page (because you will “bleed visitors” through YT embedded videos).
• Any video, the sudden loss of which would hurt your business.

What to Use Instead?

The short answer is that for business related videos, you should either host them yourself or (my recommendation) use a video-service such as Wistia. Wistia provides a fantastic service, amazingly detailed video stats, a great video player and much more. It comes with a whole range of tools that support your marketing efforts and all the videos you see on this site are hosted by Wistia. As usual, I tested a ton of different options and services, before deciding that this one was the best.

The longer answer will be delivered shortly, in a separate blog post, covering everything you need to know about online video.

How to Make YouTube Videos Suck Less

If you take all of the above into consideration and you’re 100% aware of the benefits as well as the risks associated with YouTube and you still want to use the service, we’ve got something for you.

For embedded YouTube videos, you can add parameters to remove some of the YouTube branding, prevent related videos from showing up at the end, set the video to auto-play and more. And we’ve built a nifty little free tool, to help you set all that up: Better YouTube Embeds

This online tool, which takes only seconds to use, automatically sets some options to improve your YT embedded videos and it gives you a simple choice of tick-boxes for further customization. Just grab any YouTube video URL and have a play with it.

Did you enjoy this post? Do you have any un-answered questions about the topic? Please let us know by leaving a comment below!

Most people don’t like being “salesy” and pushing products on people. Ideally, we could run a business that makes us a lot of money, without having to promote stuff all the time. And that’s exactly what I’m doing with IM Impact.

How can you promote stuff and make money, without being salesy? Read on to find out!

IM Impact Business Model

Watch the video below to discover what you can take from the IM Impact business model and apply to you own business:

Here’s the post you need to check out, if you aren’t yet familiar with the New Traffic Paradigm.

Direct Promotion vs. Service Based Promotion

As mentioned in the video, one of the keys to what I do is that I focus on providing the most useful possible service to my readers. One of the consequences of this is that I sometimes promote stuff and you might not even notice.

As an example, let’s use my recent post about the two most important factors that determine the success of a website. This post contains an affiliate link for Visual Website Optimizer, which is a split testing tool. However, I doubt anyone looks at that post and thinks “eugh, Shane is pushing products again…”

The crucial factor is that the post was written to be as useful as possible. The idea for this post came from a combination of some comments I read on this site and some books I recently wrote. I felt like the lesson, the message in this post was a crucial one and that many could benefit from it greatly.

That’s why I wrote the post. Now, in any discussion about optimizing websites and optimizing content, split testing has to be mentioned, because it’s so crucial to the whole process. As you’ll see in the post, I mention that Google Website Optimizer is free to use, but that I personally prefer and use a different solution. And that’s where Visual Website Optimizer comes in.

After I published the post, I sent out an update about it to my subscribers. You could say that I indirectly sent a promotional email, since the link in the email went to the blog post and the post contains an affiliate link.

Compare that to the way products are usually promoted in the IM space: you get an email with a subject line like

“MUST HAVE Marketing Tool Revealed! If You Don’t Get This, You’re Leaving MONEY ON THE TABLE!!”

The email is all about how you have to sign up for this service right now and the affiliate link is repeated a couple of times. The next day, you get another email, reminding you that the “Offer is About to Close! Get in NOW!!!” along with more hype and several further repetitions of the affiliate link.

What’s worse, the typical promotion wouldn’t be for a tool like VWO in the first place. It’s kind of an advanced tool and it’s extremely high quality and in continued development. This is reflected in the price, although you can’t call it expensive, by any means. Still, it’s a lot easier to talk people into buying some “magic button” that costs only $7-$37, than explaining the merits of a subscription based service like VWO.

The Inconvenient Truth

Okay, so the above is an outline of how IM Impact can be profitable even if I’m not directly promoting anything for months on end. If you look at my previous posts, you’ll see many examples of posts that are 100% focused on providing valuable information, but also contain the odd affiliate link, if it makes sense in the context.

But let me be very clear about something: direct promotions are far more effective.

We generally don’t like parting with our money. The most effective way to get someone to make the buying decision is often to add a sense of urgency and to prod them on, a little bit. A message in the vein of “hey, here’s a nice and useful thing” just doesn’t pack a lot of punch.

As I said in the video: I could easily make more money by doing more direct promotions. But what’s important to me is your actual benefit from what I do, as well as your involvement in and engagement with what I do.

If you look at your subscribers and fans as walking credit cards, you can get a lot of money out of them, right now. If you treat them like the human beings they are, you can get an immense amount of value out of them and you can earn. Possibly even in the long run.

And long term, sustainable, service-oriented business models are what I’m all about.

What are your thoughts on this matter? Do you know examples of businesses that sell extremely well, without being salesy? Let me know by leaving your comment below!

In addition, you’ll also discover the easiest ways to replicate the tests we utilized during the webinar and you’ll find a list of all the sites and resources we mentioned during the call.

Read on to get everything you need, to start making more sales from your site as well.

Webinar Replay

Watch the video below to see the full website clinic webinar recording:

You can also download the video recording here, if you prefer. Plus, if you can’t get enough, you can see a short “bonus footage” video, from the after-hours part of the webinar: bonus video.

How to Construct a Blur Test Using Free Online Tools

On the webinar, we did “blur tests” for each of the sites that we looked at. Blur tests are a great way of identifying the areas of high contrast on your site as these are the areas that naturally draw the eyes of your readers and therefore get their attention.

The idea is to take a screenshot of your web site, use an image editing tool to desaturate the colours and then run a Gaussian blur filter to the point where you can’t make out the text on the page.

If you’re not a graphics designer and you don’t really understand the terms that I’ve just mentioned – have a look at this very quick tutorial below where I show you how you can construct a blur test for your own site using only free tools that you can access online:

1. Take a print screen of your landing page. To do this simply search for the “Prt Scr” button if you’re a PC user or Apple Key + Shift + 3 if you’re a Mac user.
2. Now you have an image of your web site saved to your clipboard that you can use. The next step is to navigate to a great little site called http://www.pixlr.com and create a new image:
   
3. Click “Create a New Image” and then specify the height and width of the canvas.  You’ll need to make sure that the canvas size is at least as big as the resolution of your monitor so that your screen grab fits!
4. Go to the “Edit” menu and then click “Paste”
   
5. Now you should have an image of your web site in the online web editor.  The next step is to desaturate the colours in the image.  You can do that by going to “Adjustment” and then “Desaturate”
   
6. Finally, you simply need to apply the Gaussian blur.  Simply head to the “filters” menu and then select “Gaussian Blur”.  You should change the level of the blur so that you can’t make out any of the text on the page.  I used a setting of 60:
   
   
   
7. You now have the perfect blur test image  for your site!  You can also zoom out a little (view -> zoom out). This makes it easier to take in the whole page at a glance. Here’s an example blur test for the the very post you’re currently looking at:-

Further Resources

Another method we used on the webinar was the “five second test”. This is a test to determine how clear the purpose of your site is and how intuitive and easy to understand your navigation and site layout are.

You can do a five second test by showing and web page to someone you know (but who hasn’t seen the page yet) for five seconds and then asking them about it. For a more systematic approach, you can also check out the five second test service, which is a tool provided by Usability Hub.

The following tools and resources were also mentioned during the webinar:

• Firebug (Firefox) and Firebug lite (Chrome) for inspecting page elements and previewing changes. Check out this video tutorial on how to use Firebug.
• Google Website Optimizer – a free and slightly finicky split testing tool.
• Visual Website Optimizer – a very easy to use split testing tool (my favorite).
• Wistia – the video service I use, as mentioned towards the end of the webinar.

Did you enjoy the webinar and this post? Do you want to see more content like this in the future? Please leave a comment below, to let us know!

If so, this post is for you.

Read on to find out the only two factors that truly matter for your website’s performance and profitability.

Content and Conversion

I’m not about to beat around the bush, here: the two factors are content and conversion.

Much like the north star can be used to navigate a ship across the sea, you can use content and conversion as your guiding lights. Every single decision you make about your website will be easier to make, once you understand these two principles. And every decision you make, based on these principles, will make your website more successful and more profitable.

So, what exactly are the principles behind content and conversion?

Every page on your site should aim to be highly readable, easily consumable, provide what the visitor is looking for and it should drive the visitor towards your conversion goal in one way or another.

Let’s go into a bit more detail and then look at a few good and bad examples.

What “Good Content” Really Means

Much has already been said about the importance of creating good content. In fact, it’s something that is usually over-stated and under-explained in the blogging-about-blogging niche.

Good content is usually a very fluffy concept and most people associate it with A) many words on your page (perhaps with a few images as well) and B) better information than you can find elsewhere.

In some cases, this is true. However, in others, it is no. The most important thing to keep in mind about content is that it should match your visitors’ needs. Sometimes, the best possible content you can put on a page is an extremely long, in-depth article. Sometimes, it’s a silly, 30-second video. It all depends on your market and your visitor’s intention.

Design and Usability

Assuming that your content is “good” and matches your target market, the next most important thing is to make it as accessible as possible.

Here are the top three most important factors for highly accessible website content:

1. Make your content easily readable.
2. Make your navigation clear and easy to understand.
3. Make sure your pages load as quickly as possible.

In general, we are not very patient when we browse the web. There are millions of places where we might be able to find what we’re looking for, so we don’t put up with sites that make things difficult for us.

Good website design gets out of the way, so that the visitor can completely focus on the content. Bad design is in your face, screaming: LOOK AT ME, I AM A FLASHY/MODERN/OBNOXIOUS DESIGN!!!

Conversion Goals

The first and worst mistake concerning conversions is not having a clear conversion goal. No matter what type of website you run and no matter what your business model is, your site must have one main conversion goal. Without a conversion goal, you are simply flying blind.

In most cases, your site will have one main, “global” conversion goal and a set of secondary conversion goals for specific pages.

For example, the main conversion goal on an ecommerce website will be getting the customer to make a purchase (of many, high-priced items, preferably). Each individual product description page has the secondary conversion goal of getting the visitor to add that specific product to their shopping cart.

In a different example, your site’s main conversion goal may be to get people to sign up to your service, while individual pages on your site have a specific secondary goal of getting a visitor to take the next step in your funnel and look at your main sales-page. Other pages again may have a secondary conversion goal of getting people to share a piece of content socially, to spread your brand and reach new audiences.

Calls to Action

Of course, just having conversion goals in the back of your mind or written down on a notepad won’t help much. You also need to actively drive people towards those goals. You need to invite visitors to take that next step.

The easiest way to do this is to add clear calls to action to your pages. Here are the top three ways you can call to a specific action, on your site:

1. Use color and contrast to make a conversion element stand out.
2. Limit the amount of possible options that visitors can take on your page.
3. Write out very clearly what you want your visitors to do and why they should do it.

That last point is the most important one. It’s almost counter-intuitive, but no matter how obvious an action is, simply calling your visitors to perform it will almost always increase your conversion rates.

For example, there’s only one way in which visitors can interact with an opt-in form. But adding some text like “sign up to join my mailing list!” will almost certainly lead to a slight increase in conversions. To get even better results, combine your call to action with a benefit statement: “sign up below to join my mailing list and learn my best-kept knitting secrets!”

Here’s an illustration, using a video thumbnail as an example:

That last example is a bit crowded, which isn’t ideal. However, that’s only because I wanted to keep these images at a reasonably small size. On a full-sized video thumbnail, you’ll find more than enough space to add a good call to action, without visually messing up the image.

Examples

Watch the video below for some examples of sites that get the “content and conversions” principle right… and one that really doesn’t:

Guided Testing

Of course, neither I nor anyone else can truly predict what call to action will get the highest conversion rates for your market and your audience, or what color opt-in box will work best on your site. We can all only make educated guesses.

And we can test.

It cannot be overstated how important split testing is, for any online business. The ability to split test is the most significant advantage that online businesses have, over brick-and-mortar businesses. Make sure you make use of it!

For testing, you can use the free Google Website Optimizer or the more user friendly and feature-rich Visual Website Optimizer (my personal favorite).

Conclusion

Intelligent testing of your website, using the "content and conversion" principle as your guideline will inevitably make your website better and more profitable. Create awesome content, matching your visitors' interests and needs, make this content very easily accessible and highly readable, have a clear conversion goal and run tests, aiming to increase the number of visitors who reach that conversion goal.

Do this and you'll quickly be ahead of 90% or more of your competitors.

Did you enjoy this post? Tweet it, share it on facebook and let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment below!

This coming Saturday, I’m going to do a live webinar unlike any I’ve ever tried before. You’ll get a unique chance to get help with creating better websites, getting more traffic, getting better conversion rates and more.

Watch the video below to see what the webinar will be about.

What it’s All About

On this coming Saturday (May 5, 2012), we will do a live website clinic on a webinar. You can submit your site and if it gets picked, we’ll take a live look at it on the webinar and discuss ways to improve the site and make it more profitable.

I will give you advice on what I would do with the site, if it were mine. This way, you get a chance to tap into all the experience and advice I can offer, without having to pay for expensive one-on-one coaching (sidenote: I don’t do any one-on-one coaching). Advice will include everything and anything I can tell you about how to improve SEO factors on your site, how to get more traffic, creating a better design, creating better site structure and navigation, improving your branding, improving user engagement and even improving the entire business model of your site.

How to Submit Your Site

If you have a website you’d like to see reviewed, you can submit it in the comments below. It’s important that it’s a site that you are willing and able to invest a few hours into improving, so that you can actually implement the advice you get, should your site get picked for the webinar.

To submit your site, simply do the following:

1. Leave a comment below and clearly state that you would like your site included on the webinar.
2. Enter the address of your site in the comment URL field.

That’s all.

I will try to cover five sites on the webinar. Of course, even if your site does not get picked, you can still benefit from attending the webinar and applying the same improvement tips we give for someone else’s site, to your own.

Webinar

I will send out the invitation link for the webinar shortly. You need to be on my mailing list, to receive the webinar invitation. In case you didn’t already get here via my email list and you are not yet subscribed, you can sign up here:

Sign Up for Free >>

That’s all for now. Submit your site below and keep your eyes peeled for the webinar registration link. I, for one, am looking forward to the event and I hope to see you there!

*not really.

Watch this short video review to see exactly what you can get out of Cashvertising, as an online marketer.

Discover its strengths and its weaknesses and see a new kindle in action!

Video Review

Summary

Early in the book, the author compares advertising to sales personnel: each ad you publish, each page on your website, each sales- or squeeze page is like a sales rep. The question is: are these sales reps doing a good job? Are they doing their best to get you more customers and spread your brand? Or are they lazy and ineffective?

One of the chief ways to make your "virtual sales reps" work harder for you is by using better copy and that's where Cashvertising's main emphasis lies. This book teaches you all the fundamentals necessary to create attention-grabbing headlines and titles, to keep visitors interested and engaged and quite simply to make more sales.

The book comes with many practical examples and tips you can implement right away. I enjoyed reading it and on more than one occasion, it sent my head spinning with new ideas.

The only downside is that some of the chapters are very specific to print advertising. You can probably skip those chapters, as they don't offer anything that translates to a purely online-based business.

Click here to get your copy of Cashvertising!

Did you enjoy this review? Would you like to see more book reviews on IM Impact? Do you have any recommendations for books about marketing and advertising? Let me know by leaving your comment below!

But beyond that, how much use do we actually get from checking our stats? How often is it a real, useful business tool and how often is it just another distraction?

I was using analytics the wrong way for years and you’ve probably done the same. In this post, let’s kick our bad habits and look at how to use analytics to actually improve your online business.

Watch the Video Below:

Links: learn about a critical limitation in the way Google Analytics measures bounce rates and check out this review of Google Analytics alternatives.

The Top Down Approach to Analytics

The right way to approach web analytics is to start with a result in mind: what is it that you want to improve on your website? What's your main coversion goal? What are your secondary goals? Depending on your business model, the answers can vary. They might include:

• Make more sales.
• Get more leads/opt-ins.
• Get more clicks on affiliate links.
• Get more ad impressions (page loads).
• Increase user engagement.
• Get more visitor participation (user generated content).
• Get a better idea of what people in your niche want and need.
• Improve social sharing.
• etc...

Once you know what your goals are, you need to ask yourself what kind of data you need, to be able to make changes to your website intelligently, in order to reach those goals. Think of it as performance-based analytics.

Finally, figure out which tools you need, that will provide the necessary data and help you make the right improvements to your site. The answer simply isn't always (or even often) going to be "Google Analytics". In general, you'll probably need a good analytics solution as well as a split testing tool such as Google Website Optimizer (basic and free) or Visual Webite Optimizer (awesome).

My question for you is: what are the main goals for your website? What do you need to improve? What kind of data and tools would the perfect analytics solution provide for you? Leave a comment and let me know!

Unfortunately, a closer look under the hood reveals that there are a few things GA does not do well at all. Depending on your business model and your needs, a different analytics solution might serve you far better and be a lot more useful to your business.

Read on to discover the drawbacks of using Google’s own system and learn about the best Google Analytics alternatives.

Quick Navigation

What’s Wrong With Google Analytics?

From a technical standpoint, there is at least one glaring mistake in the way Google Analytics tracks pageviews and visitor actions. We’ve written about it extensively in the post about bounce rates, where you’ll also find something of a hack, to help improve the situation.

In short, GA cannot truly measure how long a visitor stays on your site, unless they perform another action like a new page load. Many visitors will show up as having stayed on your site for zero seconds, even though they might have spent minutes or more, reading a page or watching a video. This leads to skewed bounce-rate and time-on-site data. This is not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it’s something you should be aware of.

By all means, use GA, it’s infinitely better than not analyzing your traffic at all.

For many website owners, there’s one other reason not use GA: Google. GA is free and the trade-off is obvious: you get a great, free service in return for data. Keep in mind that Google does not condone most of the things we do to get better rankings and more traffic. If you do any kind of active link-building, no matter how legitimate it is, Google might just decide that they no longer tolerate that and start cracking down on it. One way or another, many or all of your sites are probably in some way involved in manipulating search results in your favour. Google no likey.

What if one of your sites gets caught up in a Google cleanup/slap and it just so happens to be sitting in a GA account along with all of your other sites? Could that compromise every single website you own? Possibly. I, for one, would rather not find out the hard way.

How to Spy on Your Website Visitors

Here are some of the criteria I looked for, in the different analytics services:

• Does it do real-time tracking, so that you can see what’s going on on your site right now?
• Does it properly measure time on site, even if only one page is viewed?
• Does it make a distinction between a “bad bounce” (short, one-page visit) and a “good bounce” (long, one-page visit)?
• Does it allow useful sorting and filtering of the stats, so you can make intelligent decisions based on your analytics?
• Does it allow easy goal/conversion tracking?

Woopra

Woopra is extremely attractive and highly customizable. You can either use it online or download a desktop client or mobile app to track what’s going on on your site.

The customization options are this service’s strongest point: to any set of data you’re looking at, you can add any kind of filters you can think of. Do you want to look specifically at the conversion rates from people who discovered your site through twitter and viewed at least two pages? No problem. Do you want to attach a specific label to anyone who leaves a comment on your site and also pass their name and email address to Woopra? With a bit of custom coding, it can be done.

To top it off, Woopra also comes with a live chat feature, which lets you display a “chat with us” widget on your site, or lets you automatically invite visitors to chat when a certain set of criteria are met. For example, you could set the chat window to pop up when a visitor is spending a certain amount of time on the checkout page, to help them with any last questions or objections they might have. As I’m sure you can see, Woopra is powerful, if it’s used right. But therein also lies a big problem with the service…

There are three big disadvantages to Woopra:

1. Their pricing plans don’t allow you to group multiple sites together. You have to create a new subscription for every website you want to add.
2. Woopra don’t do customer support. They have a support desk, but from what I can tell, they ignore tickets, even if they contain very simple questions.
3. There’s no documentation to speak of. At the time of writing, there are API and developer docs, but no basic instructions for how to use Woopra.

Woopra Features and Highlights

Conclusion: Woopra is an extremely promising service that has the potential to be hugely beneficial to your business. Unfortunately, since they severely lack support and documentation and because of their pricing model I can’t recommend them.

Link: Check out Woopra here.

Mint

Mint is a very stylish “less is more” kind of analysis software. Where many others pile on feature after feature, Mint strives to show you the most relevant data about your website in a simple “at a glance” kind of way.

The “less is more” principle is take a tad too far, sadly. The standard view shows you the visitor count (total and unique), the top referring websites, your most popular pages and the most popular search terms people are using to find your site. You can edit each view for a certain date-range or to show you recent terms/referrers rather than popular ones. Interestingly, there’s also a separate view for traffic coming through image searches, which could be a very interesting feature for certain types of websites like portfolio sites, sites about design or any other image-heavy sites.

Data digging is almost non-existent with Mint. It also doesn’t show bounce rates, time on site or any other useful user engagement metrics. My impression is that Mint shows you mainly “vanity stats”, but fails to give you the tools necessary to sort your data in such a way that it can lead to intelligent changes on your website, that improve your business.

The basic functionality of Mint can be expanded with so-called “Peppers”. These are plugins for Mint, which are provided by the developers themselves as well as third-party providers. Possibly, some of the features I was missing in the standard version can be added through these extensions (I did not spend a lot of time searching through them).

Mint is a self-hosted script and it costs a flat rate of $30 per website, making it very affordable.

Mint Features and Highlights

Conclusion: Mint is stylish and light-weight, but is it also useful? Unless there’s a very specific feature found in one of the many “pepper” extensions, that you’ve been looking for, I can’t see a reason to use Mint.

Link: Learn more about Mint here.

Clicky

I’ve been using Clicky for quite a long time now. In the beginning, I had mixed feelings about the user interface, but once I got used to it, I recognized it’s merits. The standard dashboard gives a very comprehensive overview over all of the core data: visitors (today vs. yesterday or any other date-range you set), visitor actions and bounce rate, top content, top search terms and traffic sources.

One thing Clicky does reall well is allow you to dig down and segment/filter your data in many ways. It doesn’t just show you some fancy graphs, it let’s you get right down to the stuff that matters the most: you can find where your best converting traffic is coming from, you can see which pages are grabbing your visitors’ attention and which aren’t and much more.

Clicky also offers a simple way to set up campaigns and track earnings. An interesting feature is that it allows you to set up custom twitter searches, so that you can monitor mentions of your site or brand on twitter, from within the Clicky dashboard. The service also integrate with a service called SheerSEO as well as Visual Website Optimizer for rank tracking and split testing respectively. Plus, it comes with a very well-made WordPress plugin.

Clicky calculate bouce rate differently from most analytics solutions and they’re proud of it. Clicky considers every visitor who spends more than 30 seconds looking at a page as an “engaged” visitor and doesn’t count them as a bounce, even if they don’t view a second page on your site. This makes a lot of sense, since you can’t really say that someone who visits your site, reads a whole post and then leaves was “bouncing”. They just found what they were looking for. With this, Clicky has more relevant bounce stats, especially for blog-style sites where the goal is not necessarily to get every visitor deeper into a sales-funnel.

Clicky Features and Highlights

Conclusion: Intuitive and clean user-interface, reasonable pricing and some innovative features make Clicky a Google Analytics alternative worth taking a closer look at. Clicky has become my favorite analytics solution and I gladly recommend it.

Link: Click here to get Clicky with it.

StatCounter

StatCounter is one of the better-known free Google Analytics alternatives and it’s been around for a while.

There’s no way to be nice about this, so I’ll just say it: Compared to the other solutions listed here, StatCounter is ugly. But, just because you don’t get the “oooh, shiny!” effect when you log into StatCounter, doesn’t mean it’s a bad product. The basic data is all there and you can get insights into visits, visitor paths, popular pages, entrance- and exit-pages, incoming keywords etc.

In terms of segmentation, goals, campaign/funnel tracking and fancy stuff like that, StatCounter lags behind the competition. As with Mint, I found that StatCounter fails to deliver the kinds of insights that will actually help you make meaningful changes to your site.

StatCounter Features and Highlights

Conclusion: StatCounter has one saving grace: it’s free to use. Given that, it’s no surprise that it doesn’t come with all the bells and whistles of premium solutions. Unfortunately, some of those bells and whistles are really important, which is why I can’t recommend this product.

Link: Learn more about StatCounter here.

reinvigorate

Reinvigorate looked very promising, back when I was using the beta version. It still looks exactly the same, now. And that’s a bad thing.

Reinvigorate still feels like a beta product, even thought it’s been on the market for a while now. It has a very attractive looking user interface and it comes with a built-in heatmapping feature which can be very useful.

Unfortunately, in terms of actual traffic analysis, reinvigorate is mostly frustrating. It offers a great overview of the basic stats such as number of visitors, visit lengths and so on, but it doesn’t let you go any deeper than that. I found myself constantly clicking on elements of the UI, expecting to get a more detailed view for a specific page or specific search term. But nothing happens when you click, because more detailed reports are not available.

To make things worse, it seems that this service has been abandoned: at the time of writing their blog has been offline for more than a week (but a link to it from the sales-page remains) and their customer support is unresponsive.

reinvigorate Features and Highlights

Conclusion: in its current form, reinvigorate is a basic heat-mapping tool with some analytics added on. This could be quite useful, but especially since it seems to be abandoned, I’d recommend using a dedicated heatmapping service and a better analytics solution instead. Reinvigorate is not recommended.

Link: Take a look at what reinvigorate could have been, right here.

Piwik

Piwik is advertised as an open-source alternative to Google Analytics and this seems an accurate description. It’s completely free to use and fairly easy to install. Currently only available as a self-hosted script (which has it’s advantages), there’s also the possibility of a hosted version of the service in discussion.

While the Piwik dashboard is nowhere near as fancy looking as some of the competitors’, I immediately took a liking to it. It’s a bit reminiscent of the WordPress admin interface and it just seems to have all the data and all the buttons in the right places. I found it very easy to navigate the data and set up some basic goals for performance tracking. It’s also a breeze to add as many websites as you like to one and the same Piwik installation. Much like with Mint, the Piwik dashboard is very customizable and additional plugins are available to add to the system.

One of the best features is that you can very easily set up and track goals. Beyond the basic stats, I would have liked options for deeper and more detailed segmentation, which is often lacking.

Piwik Features and Highlights

Conclusion: For a free analytics tool, Piwik is quite impressive. I would have liked a few more features, but the only big drawback is that Piwik has the same, inaccurate way of tracking bounce rates and visit lengths that Google Analytics has.

Link: Get a taste of Piwik here.

Open Web Analytics

Open Web Analytics (or OWA) is another free, open source web stats solution, like Piwik. It’s also self-hosted and it’s available as a WordPress plugin, which creates one instance of OWA to track the specific WP site it’s installed on. Installed separately and independently from WordPress, you can use OWA to track multiple websites.

The user interface is reminiscent of one of the older Google Analytics interfaces in the choice of colors as well as the general navigation. It’s not a carbon copy of GA by any means, but it offers the same general navigation options and if you’ve used GA for a while, it won’t take long until you feel right at home with this new interface.

Open Web Analytics is very feature-rich, especially considering that it’s free to use. It can track goals along several steps of a conversion funnel, it offers separate stats filtered by pretty much any factor you can think of and it even offers heatmaps and mouse-tracking. However, be warned: with those last two options active, OWA will gobble up server resources like nobody’s business. A shared hosting account will not find this agreeable.

Open Web Analytics Features and Highlights

Conclusion: OWA is amazing, for a free product. It offers very deep analytics with an intuitive interface. Unfortunately, it also has the same bounce-rate and time on site weakness of most analytics tools. In short, it’s not perfect, but possibly the best free solution available.

Link: Grab your copy of Open Web Analytics here.

Chartbeat

Chartbeat is like reinvigorate on steroids. Which is to say that it’s extremely pretty, but also mostly useless.

Chartbeat has a very strong focus on what’s happening right now, as opposed to the emphasis on historical data analysis that most tools have. On a second-by-second basis, it shows you how many visitors are on your site, how many of them are reading or writing (e.g. comments), the geographic location of the visitors, an action stream and much more. Like Clicky, it also comes with twitter monitoring, so you can see who’s talking about your site or brand, at any given moment.

One very interesting and potentially useful user engagement metric is that Chartbeat shows you a graph of the average scroll-depth for your visitors (i.e. how far down a page they are scrolling). Apart from that, I find it difficult to envision the actual use of all these metrics. Chartbeat shows me what’s buzzing on my site at any given moment, but unless I can match up factors like conversion rates, traffic sources etc. none of this really helps me make intelligent decisions about my site.

Chartbeat Features and Highlights

Conclusion: Chartbeat is very pretty and maybe there are some uses to it. To me, it seems more like a super-attractive distraction than a useful tool.

Link: Marvel at Chartbeat here.

Honorable Mentions: Mixpanel and Kissmetrics

Mixpanel and Kissmetrix are two analytics services that were specifically made for businesses selling services or products. Both of these tools are especially useful if you are selling a subscription service, as they can not only track conversions, but also track retention rates. With that, they can give you insights into where your highest-converting visitors are coming from and what steps they usually take before signing up. In addition, they can help you analyze what makes customers stay with your service for a long time and what makes them leave in a hurry.

Mixpanel and Kissmetrix are very interesting services for a specific type of business. Because they are closely analytics-related, I wanted to mention them here. However, they aren’t necessarily meant to replace your “regular” website analytics and because of how highly specialized they are, they don’t quite fit in with the other services here. Perhaps I will review them separately, sometime.

Go here to check out Mixpanel and Kissmetrics.

My Personal Preferences

Leading up to this review I was using a huge range of different analytics apps for my various websites and I had fun experimenting with all the different features and options. However, at some point I wanted to consolidate my data and not have to log into a dozen different panels to see the traffic stats for all my sites. Currently, I use Clicky as my main analytics tool. I’d love to be able to recommend Woopra, as I think it’s the most promising of all tools, but the disadvantages I mentioned outweigh all it’s great features.

I only use GA on sites that I created a long time ago, using GA from the beginning. I keep it there, along with Clicky, so that I don’t lose the historical data. When creating a new site, I would only use GA if it’s a site monetized with AdSense. With AdSense, Google is already spying on your site anyway and linking AdSense and GA can give you great insights. Any other site goes on Clicky.

I originally wanted to use either Piwik or OWA, but I didn’t like how resource-intensive they were, sitting on my hosting account. So just be warned: if you have sites with a fair amount of traffic, the self-hosted analytics solutions can become quite the resource gluttons.

Conclusion

As you can see, for anyone wanting to keep Google’s googly-eyes away from their visitor data, there’s no shortage of excellent Google Analytics alternatives. Most of these services come with either a free version or a free trial, so there’s nothing stopping you from giving them a test-drive. If you don’t want to spend anything extra for your analytics, then you should give either Piwik or Open Web Analytics a try.

What do you use for analysing your website visitors? And how do you make use of the data you get? Let me know in the comments below!

Cheers,

While we can’t be certain exactly what these signals are, it is widely suspected that bounce rate is an important ranking factor. In this post I’ll define exactly what bounce rates are and describe when a bounce isn’t actually a bounce.

Plus, you’ll discover why the bounce rate data shown in Google Analytics is mostly useless and see what you can do to fix this problem.

What is the Bounce Rate?

Here is Google’s official definition of bounce rate:

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page. Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.
- Source

So, effectively – if someone visits a page on your site and then leaves without visiting any other pages on your site (either by hitting the back button on their browser, by visiting another site, closing the browser, or by entering a new domain into the address bar) then that’s classified as a bounce.

When is a Bounce not really a Bounce?

Here’s where it gets slightly more confusing…Consider the following two scenarios:-

By definition, both visitor A and visitor B have bounced, however when used in conjunction with the time on site metric you can see that while visitor A probably didn’t find anything useful on the landing page (having spent only 5 seconds on site), visitor B has stuck around for over 5 minutes, probably found the answer the he/she was looking for and then bounced.

In the search engine industry, this time on site metric is called “dwell time” and dwell time has a very high positive correlation with user engagement.

Consider the example that we used in the “New Rules of SEO” webinar: If a user types in “USD to GBP conversion”, it’s likely that the user will land on a page with a calculator and bounce away when he/she finds the answer that they’re looking for.  In this example, the landing page catered exactly to the needs of the user, but the user still bounced (by definition).

However, when bounce rate and dwell time are used in conjunction with one another, a more reliable insight is gained into how engaged a particular user is with a piece of content.

There is significant evidence to suggest that search engines are looking very closely at dwell time and using it as a signal:

While it may feel like you’ve poured your heart and soul into creating the content on the website, quality is in the eye of the visitor, and short page dwell times can indicate the content is not capturing the visitor’s interest. Something about the content is not grabbing their attention.

- Duane Forrester – Public Outreach, Bing Search Engine

So, what we really should be doing as webmasters is paying attention to bounce rates in conjunction with dwell times.  If we find content that has a high bounce rate and low dwell time, then that is a good signal that the content is not giving the users what they expect.

Here in lies the problem….

Bounce Rates and Google Analytics

The most obvious way to track down content that is under performing in these key metrics is to use Google analytics and apply a filter across all your content.

However, Google analytics only tracks bounce rate and time on site metrics through pageviews.  This is really important to understand – if you don’t then you may start hacking out content from your site that you think is performing badly, but in reality may not be.

For example, if a visitor lands on one of your pages, stays for 8 minutes and 12 seconds before “bouncing” back to the search engines then two things will happen:-

1. The search engines themselves will see this as a positive signal because of the extended dwell time (high dwell time = good user engagement)
2. Your Google Analytics tool will show “100% bounce rate” and “0:00:00” time on site which most webmasters will interpret as a bad signal!  To reiterate: Even though the visitor has stayed for 8 minutes before leaving, it will be shown as “0:00:00″ time on site because the visitor hasn’t loaded another page on your site.

As you can see, there is a huge disconnect between what’s really happening and what’s being reported in Google Analytics.  The disconnect is so vast that less knowledgeable webmasters may end up removing content from their site that’s actually performing well!

Here are some more examples of the disconnect between what actually happens and what’s reported in Google Analytics:-

And here is the quote from Google Analytics themselves to confirm that this is what happens:-

When a page is the last page in a session, there is no way to calculate the time spent on it because there is no subsequent pageview. For this reason, when Page A is the last page in the visitor’s session, its time calculation is not counted for that view. In addition, when that page is the only page viewed in the session, no time on page is calculated.
- Source

Here’s something else that matters: Google does not use any data from your Google Analytics account to calculate rankings.  Sometimes, you have to take what Matt Cutts says with a pinch of salt due to the obvious conflict of interest that someone in his role is faced with – but on this occasion I’m very confident that Google don’t use Analytics data.

I can guarantee that the bounce rate  and time on site stats you see in your Analytics accounts are not the same metrics that the Google Rankings Team use to determine the best results for any given query.  The rankings team need far more accurate data than Analytics can provide.

What This Actually Means for Us

When you notice in your Analytics tool that a page has 100% bounce rate and a “0:00:00″ time on site, this doesn’t mean that the page is necessarily not performing well.  It could be that all visitors to that page stick around for more than 5 minutes before leaving, effectively sending a positive “dwell time” signal to the search engine.  In other words: we have no way of using Google Analytics to reliably determine the worst performing content on our site.

We need a better way of identifying poorly performing content pages.  A way that enables us to make decisions and understand what content is being appreciated and what content is holding our rankings back.

How do we Fix this in Google Analytics?

What we’d really like to know is:- “For each page on my site, what percentage of visitors stick around for longer than x seconds?”.  The value of x is up for negotiation.  Shane and I have agreed that for this site we think a suitable benchmark is 30 seconds.

If someone lands on a page and bounces within the first 30 seconds, that’s a pretty sure sign that they haven’t really found what they’re looking on an information site like ImImpact.  On the other hand, if someone stays for longer than that, then they’re at least somewhat engaged (started reading or watching a video).

Thankfully by using a feature called “Event Tracking”, we can set this up relatively painlessly simply by adding a line of code to our Google Analytics snippet:-

Synchronous Analytics Code (Old Version)

If you’re using the original Analytics tracking code (not the asynchronous version), then this is the code you need:-

Just add the following line under the pageTracker._trackPageview(); line:

Synchronous Analytics Code (New Version)

If you’re using the new version of Google Analytics tracking code (the asynchronous version), then this is the code you need:-

Just add the following as the last _gaq.push declaration in the script:

Thanks to padicode for these Analytics snippets

How Does this Work?

This script will countdown 30 seconds from when the page loads and then will “push” an event to Google Analytics.  Once the event is triggered, Analytics will no longer count this user as a “bounce” even if he/she doesn’t load any other pages on your site.  The net result is that you should see a decrease in the bounce rate on your site.

Here is a screenshot showing the bounce rates before and after the script is applied:-

The Best Way to Find Underperforming Content

Now we have set a bounce to only be recorded if a visitor stays for less than 30 seconds we have a much more reliable set of data that we can use to identify the pages that perhaps aren’t giving the end user what they expect.

To find these pages, I recommend navigating to content -> site content -> pages, clicking on “Bounce Rate” to sort from highest to lowest and changing the sort type to “weighted”.  This will give you a list of pages with the highest bounce rates to the lowest weighted by pageviews:-

With this view you can then sort through the pages to identify those with the highest bounce rates and the lowest average time on page.

Alternatives to Google Analytics

Of course, there are alternative solutions to Google Analytics.  Both Woopra and Clicky have a more accurate way of measuring both bounce rates and time on site through a process called “pinging”. Shane will be updating his Alternatives to Google Analytics post very shortly with more information about this and other new features.

In Summary

This is a mighty long post, so I wanted to write a very quick executive summary for you:-

1. If someone visits a page on your site and then exits that page without visiting any other page on your site then that is a bounce
2. Search engines use a metric called dwell time to determine whether a bounce is a “good” bounce (ie. the user found what they were looking for) or a “bad” bounce (ie. the visitor leaves within 10 seconds because your page sucks)
3. Google Analytics calculates bounce rates and time on site through pageviews.  This means that if someone “bounces” off your page then it’s always reported as 0:00:00 time on site no matter how long the visitor stays for.
4. Event tracking can be used to manipulate the bounce rate metric so that bounces are only recorded if a visitor leaves after less than 30 seconds (example script above)
5. Both Woopra and Clicky are great alternatives to Google Analytics for more accurate data.

We think that Google Analytics should do a better job of providing accurate time on site and bounce rate metrics because lesser versed webmaster may be misled into removing content that appears bad but is actually performing well.

What are your thoughts on this? Leave a comment and tell us what you think!

The Google Panda update of March 2011 and many of the subsequent updates have shook up the SEO world to a greater degree than any updates before that (at least since I’ve been involved in SEO). As a consequence, there’s quite a bit of conflicting and misleading or simply out-dated information about SEO floating around right now.

In this article, we’ll take a close look at exactly what the new SEO landscape looks like and what you can do to rise to the top, once more.

Webinar Replay

Below is the replay of the webinar we did about the new rules of SEO. You can watch the video and/or read the post for all the details.

A Brief History of Algorithms

A quick glance at search engine history provides a lot of insight into the meaning of recent Google changes. It shows us why SEO is what it is today:

Alta Vista

Before Google, Alta Vista was one of the top dogs among search engines. While it was innovative for its time, compared to today's search engines, Alta Vista was rather simplistic. It took a pretty straight forward approach to evaluating web pages, by checking how closely related a page's content was to a submitted search query. This was soon exploited through the use of keyword stuffing: a website owner could get to the top of the search results by repeating the target keyword over and over again. Often, you'd find pages that had large lists of keywords, repeated several times in white-on-white text, below the content.

Fix: penalties for keyword stuffing and hidden text were introduced, keyword density became an important factor.

Early Google

The quality of a website or a piece of content can't simply be calculated. Robots are not suitable for quality assessments of this kind. And of course, there are simply too many web-pages to evaluate manually. That is, until Google came along. Google's original innovation was that they essentially crowd-sourced web-page evaluation to all webmasters. They counted and evaluated the number of links each web-page in their index had pointing to it. PageRank was born and by using a "links are votes" approach (among other things), Google managed to deliver better and more relevant results than any competing search engines at the time.

This was soon exploited with reciprocal linking schemes, link-farms, link-networks, link-spamming tools and so on.

Fix: Google introduced countless ways to evaluate links in more detail and to discount certain types of spammy links.

Later Google

In a next step, Google started taking the concept of crowdsourcing web-page evaluation further, by monitoring social signals adding them as a ranking factor. This expands the crowd from just webmasters to any Internet user actively participating in social media.

Google Panda and Beyond

The notorious Panda update follows the same pattern of crowdsourcing web-page evaluation to actual humans, rather than relying entirely on algorithmic evaluations. It did so in two ways: the first was that the entire Panda model was based on presenting a sample of different websites to a panel of human users, who were asked to answer a series of questions along the lines of "would you trust this site with your credit card information?" and "would you recommend this website to a close friend?". See this post for some insights into the kind of questions that were asked.

They then compiled all the answers and looked for measurable commonalities among the sites that were rated as good and trustworthy by the human critics and commonalities among the ones that were rated as untrustworthy and low quality.

The goal was to find factors that could be algorithmically detected and that reliably sorted the good from the bad websites. Panda itself is mainly a way for Google to implement this so-called machine-learning process on a large scale.

In addition to all that, it's also clear that user engagement metrics play an important part in Google since the Panda update, although clear data on the topic is still hard to come by.

This is by no means a complete or completely accurate history of Google updates. If you want to get all the details, I recommend this page about Google updates.

The lesson we can take from all the above is that what has always set Google apart is their ability to find ways of using human input for their website evaluation.

SEO Basics, Then and Now

Since you're reading this, I'm assuming you are familiar with the basics of search engine optimization. You know about keyword research, you know about title-tags, header tags, optimized content, backlinks and all that Jazz. I will not explain all of these concepts here, but that doesn't mean they are no longer valid. The basics of SEO are still the same and the stuff you have learned so far still applies, for the most part.

The changes that have happened are not a case of "out with the old, in with the new". What has happened is a shift in priorities and here's an example to illustrate that:

Up until recently, you could apply a "Google recipe" to any keyword imaginable and you'd have a pretty good chance of ending up in the top spot for that keyword. The recipe went something like this:

• Pick a good keyword.
• Write 1000+ words of content, based on that keyword.
• Add the keyword to the title tag, headers and repeat it a couple of times in the text.
• Add an image or two.
• Get backlinks with the keyword as the anchor text, pointing to the new page (the more and higher-quality, the better).

Following this recipe, I'd say you had around a 70% success rate: seven out of ten sites built like that would end up being profitable.

Now, that success rate is probably around 30% or perhaps even lower. All of these SEO basics should still be applied to your sites and pages. The difference is that now, doing the basics alone is no longer always enough, because new factors have entered the scene and caused a shift in priorities.

The three main new factors are:

Factor 1: Sitewide Instead of Page-Specific

Google used to be all about individual web-pages. "Google ranks pages, not websites" was an often-repeated reminder in SEO circles.

This changed with the Google Panda update: now, an entire website can get devalued because it contains pages that are deemed low quality. At first, that might seem very worrying, but it's an update that mainly affects extremely thin sites and content farms.

Before this update, you could have a site with several "target pages" of good, relevant and well-optimized content and then add an auto-blog to the back of that, which would just regularly update with scraped or spun content. The pages generated by the auto-blog would rarely rank for anything or get you any traffic, but the fact that the site was regularly updated and had many pages was a benefit, overall. It would help your target pages rank, since those were well optimized and unique.

Another popular exploit were content farms: sites with a decent looking "front end" and an endless amount of rubbish articles on pages that had more space occupied by ads than by actual content. This model worked because some of the articles were bound to be good and would end up getting some Google traffic. Now, the entire site will be penalized or de-indexed, no matter the few good apples in the mix.

How to Detect and Fix Sitewide Issues

It's most likely not something you have to worry about. You will not get penalized for writing an uninspired blog post. Follow these guidelines and you should be fine:

• Don't create "filler" content, just to hit some long tail keywords.
• Don't use auto-generated, scraped or spun content.
• Don't have any pages with more ads than content.

Factor 2: Social Signals

Both Google and Bing have officially stated that they take social signals into account, for their search results. We know for sure that these social signals include tweets (i.e. how many times a link to a page gets shared on twitter) and facebook shares (at least those happening on publicly accessible facebook pages). It's not unlikely that other social sharing sites are also being taken into account.

We also know that apart from the number of social shares a page gets, another important factor is the authority or trustworthiness of the people doing the sharing. As a simple illustration: if you get a tweet from a twitter user with thousands of followers, that will help your rankings more than if you get a tweet from a twitter bot with no followers.

How to Gain More Social Sharing for Your Content

I'm not much of a social media person, so my expertise in this field is limited, to say the least. The few things I do know about getting more social shares, I have distilled into the free WordPress plugin Social Essentials. Here are the steps I follow:

• Make it easy for people to socially share your content.
  It seems like it shouldn't matter, but the fact is that simply adding social sharing buttons increases the amount of social shares you get.
• Encourage people to socially share your content.
  Again, it might seem like a non-factor, but something as simple as an arrow pointing towards your social sharing buttons and a call to action saying "please share this!" or something similar can significantly increase your visitors' social engagement. That's why there's a feature for adding a call to action next to your buttons, in Social Essentials.
• Track and analyze social sharing activity on your site.
  This is the main reason I built Social Essentials: it gives you a simple overview of your most shared posts and pages. Do more of what's most socially popular.

Apart from this, I'm sure it's a good idea to be active in social media and I'm sure there is a whole method and art to all this, that I have no clue about. But following just the simple steps above will already take you in the right direction.

Factor 3: User Engagement

The biggest of the new ranking factors is user engagement. The simplest way for any search engine to detect whether a website is highly engaging or not is to watch user behavior in the search results.

Picture this: someone searches for "blue widget review" and clicks on the number one result. A few seconds later, this same user bounces back to the search results page and clicks the site listed in second place. This time, the user doesn't return to the search results page.

This is a very clear sign that the second listed result provided the answer the user was looking for, while the first one did not. If this same thing happens over and over again, eventually the rankings will switch and the page that sends people bouncing back will drop below the one that makes people stick.

To my knowledge, only Bing have confirmed that they use such user engagement signals as part of their ranking algorithm, but I have no doubt that Google do the same.

In addition to that, Google clearly ask for their users' input, by presenting the choices of the +1 button and, in some cases a "block this site from my results" link, when you click on a Google listing and then hit the back button.

Remember how the history of Google updates shows a trend towards crowdsourcing website evaluation towards more and more people? The final step is to include every Internet user in this crowd and Google is the only company that can realistically do that. Google toolbars, Google Chrome, Google+, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, YouTube... there's seemingly no end to the sources that Google can potentially tap into, to figure out what people are talking about, where they are going on the web, how they are interacting with websites, what they are sharing with friends etc.

Just some of the services that are sending user data to Google.

Google even have a pretty good idea of how you're socially connected to people through non-Google services.

We can't be entirely sure about how much user activity Google can track and how exactly this factor fits into the ranking algorithm. But we can be sure that user engagement has become a major ranking factor and a critical piece of the puzzle. If you create and optimized website that appeals to Google in every way possible, but is unappealing to people, then you might get it ranked temporarily, but the negative user engagement signals sent by your visitors will send it plummeting downwards again in no time.

Here's what you can do to get better user engagement and make this ranking factor work in your favor:

Increase User Engagement With Page Speed

Page loading times are a ranking factor in Google, but if you believe what Matt Cutts says in this video, at first glance it would seem like it's a very minor factor. The statement that page speed is a factor that only affects one in 100 search queries is misleading, at best. What we can take from the statement is that very few websites are so critically slow that this will directly affect their ranking position.

To see why page speed matters more than that, here's a sampling of some interesting data:

• Amazon measure a decrease of 1% in revenue for every 1/10th of a second extra page loading time.
• Shopzilla reduced their average page loading time from 7 seconds to 2 second and subsequently saw a 25% increase in pageviews.
• Firefox shaved 2.2 seconds off of their site's average page loading time and saw a 15.4% increase in downloads, as a result.

There's a lot more data like this and it all indicates one thing: page loading speeds have a dramatic effect on user engagement. Attention spans are at an all-time low and people will simply not stick around, waiting for your website to load.

This means that if you have a slow website, you'll be sending those negative user engagement signals and that can cost you dearly, in the search results. Luckily, this is a purely technical issue and it's fairly easy to fix. Check out my guide on how to speed up WordPress sites for (very) detailed instructions.

Increase User Engagement by Understanding Search Queries

The most important factor for engaging visitors coming in from search engines is to understand search queries and create matching content. It's not longer enough to create an 800-word article loosely based on the topic of the keyword. In some cases, people are looking for informational content, but in some cases they are looking for something else entirely.

To illustrate, let's look at two keyword examples:

Example A is a keyword where following the simple "Google recipe" will not get you far. Even the most well-written 2000-word article about every possible detail on US Dollar exchange rates, garnished with great pictures and keyword optimized to perfection will simply not help you get ranked. Why? Because people typing in this keyword are not looking for a long article to read. What they want is a simple table showing the current exchange rates, or a simple calculator widget. Anything else will send them bouncing back to the search page.

If you look at the results for this keyword in Google, simple tables and calculators are exactly what you get, in the top spots. And, as a side note, another thing that all of the top ranking results have in common is that they have thousands of backlinks pointing to them, proving that the "old rules" of SEO are still as relevant as ever.

Example B is a keyword that indicates someone is most likely looking for information. More precisely, they are looking for clear instructions on how they can speed up their own WordPress website. This is a case of a keyword where a long, well-written and optimized piece of content will win the SEO battle, because that's what people expect and are looking for.

Pre-Panda, you could win the ranking game for virtually any keyword, by simply creating lots of content, optimizing it for the target keyword, adding some images and throwing lots of backlinks at it. Now, you first have think of what exactly people are looking for, based on the keyword. Depending on the search query, long content might be right or it might be completely wrong.

Increase User Engagement With Good Copywriting

In the above step, we've made sure that we understand and deliver what an incoming visitor is really looking for. Another crucial factor is to effectively communicate that we have the answer the visitor is looking for. This is a matter of writing good copy.

The most important pieces of copy you need to write for your SEO'ed pages are:

• The page title
• The meta description
• The headline
• The first sentence after the headline.

Let's use the "how to speed up WordPress" keyword as an example. The title and meta description are what shows up in the Google search results:

The title implies that I have the answer the searcher is looking for by containing the exact keyword as well as showing that it's a comprehensive and step-by-step guide. People are more likely to be looking for a detailed set of instructions that takes them through the whole process, than just a random collection of information and tips. "Ultimate step-by-step guide" communicates that I'm offering the former.

The meta description reiterates that it's a guide and ads a note about the use of free methods. People searching for this term are more likely to be looking for a free, do-it-yourself guide than a paid service. The final sentence adds an element of specificity ("76%" instead of just "faster"), which helps make your claims more credible and tangible.

This is what people see when they click through to the actual blog post:

The headline simply re-iterates what the search snippet already stated. This is helpful, because it communicates that you are indeed in the right place. Confirming to a visitor that they are still on the right path, after each click, is generally a good idea. Apart from that, I have to admit that this title isn't incredibly inspired.

The leading sentence is highlighted with bold text and makes a simple statement: here, you'll find everything you need. The "if you've been wanting to speed up WordPress websites that you own" part is almost too explicit. Obviously that's what they want and I'm making it clear that I understand what they are looking for, to an almost silly degree. It's working, though. The article in question is quite popular.

Familiarize yourself with the basic principles of copywriting, to learn how to create attention-grabbing titles, headlines and opening paragraphs. Crazy as it may seem, good copywriting will actually help your rankings, these days.

Increase User Engagement With Interactive Elements

If you add a comments section, calculators, quizzes, surveys or other interactive widgets to a page, that will increase user engagement. At least, as long as the widget is in line with the user intent implied in the search query.

The same even goes for social media sharing buttons: people who share your content socially, are already significantly more engaged that people who don't. One more reason to make social sharing as easy as possible.

This step is difficult to generalize, since it depends very heavily on search queries. Ask yourself: could there be any kind of calculator widget that would help answer the visitor's question? Calculator widgets are easy to come by and cheap to have custom programmed. Or could you add a poll or quiz to the page, that matches the general content? If a keyword lends itself to any of these, adding such a widget can lead to a huge increase in user engagement and your site will benefit from it, all around.

Increase User Engagement by Getting Warm Traffic

The warmer your traffic, the more engagement and social sharing you will see. In addition, there's a virtuous cycle that can get set in motion, because more engagement and social sharing can lead to warmer traffic. People visiting your site because a friend or trusted source recommended it on facebook or twitter are like endorsed traffic: they will likely be willing to take a closer look at your site and see it in a positive light. Similarly, if you already have many comments on a page, new visitors are more likely to leave a comment of their own. It's easier to join an existing conversation than to be the first person to speak up.

How do you get warm traffic? By being involved in your market, by communicating with your visitors and through social media, by building a personal brand and putting your personal stamp on everything you do and above all, by building a mailing list and treating your subscribers well.

To Google or Not to Google

All this brings us back to the principles of the New Traffic Paradigm. I hope you now also see part of the reason I transitioned from being heavily focused on SEO to the New Traffic Paradigm, where SEO is no longer the be-all-end-all of the business, but rather one of several useful components, built on a solid foundation.

The new rules of SEO can complicate a few things, but they also have their bright side: you can take steps towards building a sustainable business and a strong brand and those very same steps help you gain higher rankings and more traffic from Google.

Building a mailing list is useful for SEO, because it gains you warmer traffic, more user engagement and more social sharing. But the main reason to build a mailing list is because it's a hugely valuable asset to your business and you should do it, even if Google never sends you a single extra visitor, for it.

Focusing on providing a real, valuable service to a specific group of people is useful for SEO, because you'll be delivering what people are really looking for, which will increase user engagement. But the real reason to do it is because it's much easier to promote a real service through many different marketing channels, than it is to promote a thin affiliate site or a made-for-AdSense site.

Creating and selling your own product is useful for SEO, for many of the same reason focusing on providing a service helps with SEO. But the real reason to do it is because it gives you a lot more control over your marketing, it puts a real asset into your hands and it opens up marketing possibilities that you never have, as an affiliate.

Optimizing your website for increased user engagement is useful for SEO, because user engagement has become such an important ranking signal. But the real reason to do it is because more engaged users equal more income for you, almost no matter what type of website or business you have.

Building a brand is useful for SEO, because Google looks for brand signals, because you'll get brand-name searches and because it will lead to more trust and more engagement among your visitors. But the real reason to do it is because it just makes all of the above that much easier. Having a trusted brand (even if it's a small, personal brand), ultimately translates to more money in your pocket and that's something that will last, even if Google changes its mind about the importance of brands.

Following the new rules of SEO and following the New Traffic Paradigm will lead to better websites and better, more profitable businesses. I know it might seem complicated and difficult at first, but never fear: that's just your brain starting to accumulate highly valuable knowledge and skills. That feeling of "this is difficult, but I'm doing it anyway" is a clear sign that you're on the right path.

What are your thoughts about the new rules of SEO? Let me know by leaving a comment below!

All the best,

Thanks for the images go to Marcel Germain and Brett Weinstein.