However, before you actually do that, you may want to get a clearer picture of exactly why branded traffic needs to be segregated from non-branded traffic. Take note that by doing so, you’ll be gaining a much better understanding of the two most important indicators of online success, which are: the way site visitors normally interact with your business and brand, and how these visitors find your site using generic and non-branded keywords. The information you get as a result can be used to target the most valuable keywords and phrases. Segregating your traffic also gives you a clearer vision of your brand’s overall visibility and pervasiveness.

What useful pieces of information can you get by segregating your site’s traffic? Well, for one thing, you should remember that branded keywords typically show up towards the end of what’s known as the conversion funnel. They’re used by site visitors who are already aware of your brand and interested in what you have to offer. These keywords are more specific and are often based on your business name, key products, and domain names, as well as on misspellings or variations of those names. Branded keywords aren’t subjected to the kind of fluctuations experienced by non-branded keywords due to search algorithms. These are therefore very useful indicators of your site’s long-term popularity and strength. For this reason, you should strive to get more traffic from branded keywords than what you may currently be getting.

Brand Rules Features
The good news is that it’s now much easier for you to track branded traffic with the on-site tools and proprietary software offered by some companies. One such company is SEOmoz and one of the latest tools they have developed is called Brand Rules. This new tool has made it so much easier to uncover any problems that have branded keywords ranking lower than expected. And when you remove your branded traffic from your website’s overall search traffic and concentrate instead on non-branded traffic, that’s when things really get interesting. Among other things, you’ll now get a clearer view of those generic keywords that work best for your business. This, in turn, should tell you which particular keywords you should target and which types of content are most effective.

Brand Rules can be added to your existing SEO campaigns simply by clicking on the Overview tab of your SEOmoz campaign and then going to Manage Brand Rules. You should then specify the brand-related terms you want to check and then the system will filter all keywords containing the terms you typed in. Another notable feature of brand rules is that it can be added to new campaigns at the time of set up. As soon as your set up is completed, the rules will automatically apply to any other keywords you may add in the future. Furthermore, even when your rules have already been set up, you may still remove or add any keywords you choose. You also have the freedom to label the keywords as branded as well as to remove them from your branded filter.

If the campaign you’re running is hooked up with Google Analytics, then you’ll also see your website’s historical traffic data segregated into non-branded and branded metrics. Another advantage to be gained from brand rules is that you’ll gain better insight into the manner in which people land on your site, with the use of in-depth metrics that focus on the top ten landing pages and search sources as well as non-paid keywords, bounce rate, PPV, and time on site, among others. And when you filter your branded keywords in the ranking report, you should be able to see pertinent traffic data on your brand-related keywords.

There are several other options on how you can manage your keywords and these options include the ability to see all of the keywords on your list, improved list filters, and new label filters every time you add keywords. The best news is that more features are set to be added to this tool when 2012 arrives. By then, you can expect to see .CSV and .PDF reports for traffic data. You should also start seeing the top keywords that drive traffic to your site, which gives you the option of tracking them. Of course, there are other companies offering similar or complementary tools and you’d do well to check them out as well to get optimum results from your SEO campaigns.

If you need some SEO work done and you want it fast, you can invest by hiring someone to help you. However, if you must invest in an SEO consultant or expert, you might as well hire someone who really knows his craft and delivers great results. Some people who claim to be experts can fool you with tech-speak, but there are ways to help you find someone really knowledgeable who knows what he or she is doing.

First, a good SEO consultant does not give you false promises—one of which is a definite date or promises of immediate results. Ranking #1 will depend on your business’ competitors and the niche you are in; it may take days or months to get to the top ranks.

Second, you can ask about their methods. A good SEO expert will walk you through their systematic approach—and not keep you in the dark about it.

Lastly, a good SEO consultant will provide you with a comprehensive work report—and that’s not just the number of links they have acquired for the month. It should include details on what they’ve done; results and what they plan to do next. Transparency is key for good SEO and you should know what’s happening at all times.

There are basically three things to look out for in a good SEO consultant, so if you’re in the market to hire the said service, don’t hesitate to ask questions. If the answers meet the above criteria, then you may just have met your new SEO consultant.

Before, PageRank was a metric used to gauge a website’s popularity. If a website had more links from authoritative sources, its PageRank soared, regardless of the relevancy of those pages. This made the task of link building quite easy. Any newbie webmaster can just get links every month or two, observe PR improvements, be satisfied, get links again, and so on and so forth.

Now, the situation has changed. If PageRank was updated consistently then, it is randomly updated now. There are even instances where PR is updated every 3 or 5 months, and even in a year or more. This makes data less relevant than it used to be in terms of how your site is measured. When Google does see your PageRank, it could have either gone up or down. Based on experience, the correlation between PR and placement is approximately .07, which indicates that in terms of being a critical metric, PR is relatively low.

With this information, is it safe to discount PageRank when on the lookout for link partners or websites to link to? No. Logically, PageRank still has some value in terms of link building because it was at one point what Google’s algorithm was entirely based on. However, in order to weigh the value of PageRank in SEO, it is necessary to understand how it is used now.

It is important not to totally cross out PageRank. Instead of framing it as a critical metric, let’s consider it a “collateral metric” for your link building campaign. This means that:

• If you want to look for a site to post or buy links to, you can still review the PR. It’s still a perfect measure of a site’s quality. You can view a site that has a high PR as a strong website, but this doesn’t mean you have to decide to link to it.
• It’s also good to check a website’s historical PR. Before deciding to get a link from a site, ensure that the site’s PR is consistent. A site whose PR changes constantly may be prone to link manipulation and not a good site to link to.
• Of course, it is important to review the relevancy of the content of the website you want to link to. It is better to link to a PR0 webpage which has highly relevant content than a PR5 site with irrelevant content.
• Always remember PR is not the sum total of a site. Look at the weight of the site and not merely the PR.

The important thing in running any link building efforts is to not be tied down to one metric. PageRank is a metric that was relevant then and remains important now to a certain extent. However, you need to look at other metrics as well as basis of your inbound linking efforts.

Fundamentals
#1: If you think the phrase “content is king” is a cliché, think again. Content is value in the SEO industry; even if you have invested on all the technical SEO you can get your hands on, without quality content, your rankings won’t budge.
#2: Quality first, not quantity. If traffic means your reputation gets abused and vandalized by nuisance visitors, then it’s not worth it.
#3: Focus on catering to the needs of human beings, not search robots.
#4: Google is a bit overrated so don’t be gung-ho on it. Google may be the biggest search engine, but focus your rankings on other search engines too, like Bing.
#5: Don’t be overconfident. Ranking well means your competitors are working round the clock to beat you.
#6: Never attempting to trick search engines. Search engines always have a way of catching up with cheats.
#7: Do not use SEO as a stand-alone campaign. Integrate it with your advertising and social campaigns.
#8: Don’t hesitate to link up with good, authoritative sites. The Internet is built for relationships and fostering good relations with other sites can get you quality inbound links.

Targeted keywords
#9: Target relevant keywords. Also: don’t experiment with popular but less relevant search terms.
#10: Try localized optimization in order to drive more relevant traffic toward your website.
#11: Target highly specific and niche keywords.
#12: Monitor how the volume and quality of your search terms are driving traffic by using Google Analytics.

Website
#13: Internal link building is crucial so use highly descriptive anchor tags to emphasize to search engines how relevant your site is.
#14: Tone down on Flash animations; they are not entirely useful to SEO.
#15: Page titles are a relevant on-site factor so construct title tags using target keywords.
#16: Don’t rely heavily on meta-tags; search engines aren’t as impressed by them.
#17: Provide alternative text to images so make it accessible to visually-impaired users.
#18: Provide an XML sitemap to aid indexing and to troubleshoot indexing issues.
#19: Use unique content. If you must replicate, rewrite the text and give attribution to the original source.
#20: If possible, your headlines should feature keywords and use h1 and h2 tags to improve layout and relevance to search engines.
#21: Make sure your header tags are well-organized. Use only single tags to avoid penalties.
#22: Every URL should be descriptive and not functional, i.e. use www.anydomain.com/here-is-an-example and not www.anydomain.com/117665.
#23: If you have a page that features interesting links, do not call the entire page “Links” as this may be mistaken for link farming.
#2; Use Google’s Webmaster Tools to guide your optimization.
#25: Use Webmaster tools to check and fix broken links on a regular basis.

This is why monitoring incoming links is a worthwhile activity. Monitoring your links is simple: check your links on a regular basis, record figures, and map out the growth of your links over time. Doing this will give you a good grasp of your situation where links are concerned. Of course, the more important thing is not just peer at your numbers but to act upon them. You have to build lots of links, as many of them as possible.

When we say lots of links, how many links would that mean exactly?

Like business planning, the number depends on how many links you want to target. When we talk about targets, we mean realistic and short-term goals that are achievable. So how do we compute how many links need to be targeted? There is no surefire formula but targets don’t come out of a vacuum, either. When we talk about links, our basis of measurement will always be relative to that of another site. For instance, we may say we have “lots” of links but this number may be “very few” relative to another site. This would depend on the nature and the competitiveness of the niche. Fortunately, SEO practitioners have tools that can help us generate realistic targets for our link building campaigns. Some of these tools include Link Diagnosis (powered by iAcquire), Open Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tools, and Majestic SEO. All four tools have different processes in computation and will generate slightly different figures. This is because the system of indexing itself is quite arbitrary. Nonetheless, each of these tools can be used in order to establish realistic link targets.

What’s better is that to the trained or observant eye, Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer or Link Diagnosis can be used to check out the competition. Strategic advantage in the SEO industry also comes from gathering intelligence and information on your competitors. Analysis of your competitors’ links can be done by looking at the raw numbers of the links and the linking domains of your rival sites. Looking at these figures can also give you an inkling of what realistic targets you might want to set for yourself.

Start weighing the competition by knowing who they are first. You need to differentiate who your competitors are in the “virtual” world from those in the “real” world by poring over the sites that currently rank for keywords you’re already targeting. As far as link building goes, the sites that inhabit your desired spots are your genuine competitors. After you finalize your roster of competitors, just plug each site to your preferred link checking tool and get the numbers for analysis. Sites that occupy the top position in terms of number of links and linking domains are your true rivals.

While getting available SEO data from Google is not a bad idea, you should not be too dependent on them for the reason stated above. Moreover, Google.com’s Webmaster Central only provides you with data from your website, disregarding other factors that might be relevant and helpful to promoting your site.

Research and Monitoring Tools

Various research tools gather details on the current state of your site, your customers, and your competitors. Their processes are automated but you should mold your research process and alerts using your current goals.

Constant monitoring will inform you of changes and point out what needs to be given more focus.

Readers should take note of the above fact; monitoring and research tools may go hand-in-hand, but they necessitate distinct tool functionality for them to be effective.

What Type of Tools do you Need?

You need tools that you can get email alerts from to monitor ranking shifts across a wider range. With the increased amount of indirect and direct clients that you can observe, you will be capable of detecting algorithm changes early on and identify what triggered them. Thus, having the right monitoring tools is essential.

Using these tools enables you to emulate effective tactics from competitors, helping you avoid ineffective ones. Moreover, the tools will allow you to see if action is needed to further bolster your hold on your current ranking. Usually, this boils down to link building, which cycles back to learning from your competitors as this process usually entails that you analyze the strengths and weakness of the players in your niche.

Two of the recommended tools for link building are:
•    Majestic-SEO, Majestic-12’s backlink analysis assistance, and
•    “Aggregated web mining” service provider Syntryx.

To get the best results, combine various tools, with Yahoo! search engine, and double check results along with a custom engine.

Apart from doing link building using monitoring tools for better SEO, you should consider the nuances of the niche you are in and analyze the websites that are linking back to your site. Do not forget the social media side of SEO: with the success of social networking sites like Twitter, you can collect contacts easily, greatly bolstering your campaign.

There are several causes of duplicate content, and they are categorized into two: malicious duplicate content and non-malicious duplicate content.

Malicious content is the intentionally developed search spam that aims to manipulate the search results to acquire more traffic.

On the other hand, there are perfectly benign content that can be misinterpreted by search engines as duplicate ones. These include canonical http:// page variations, session IDs used for shopping cart software, web pages that have the same templates, and block level shingles. Moreover, printer-friendly versions of a web page have also been known to set this off.

Due to the complexity of web pages nowadays, a user tends to have a hard time reading. Aside from flickering ads and images that distract, staring too long at a computer monitor may cause a reader to suffer from eyestrain. This created the need for printer-friendly web page versions.

Several Web designers believe that if a page is created for the Web, that is where it has to be read. Unfortunately, because of distracting elements, people prefer these duplicated simpler pages that only contain texts.

Here arises the duplicate content problem. There are, however, particular ways to create printer-friendly pages without running the risk of a search engines indexing the printer-friendly page instead of the original web page.

Consider the following ways to prevent printer-friendly pages from being included in search results by search engines:

• Include a robots metatag in the page elements, notifying the engines to not archive or index the page. The code goes like this:

After search engines scan that page, they will know that the site owner does not want the page to be indexed. With that, search engines will simply ignore it and move on to the next.

• Put a “printer-friendly version” on the main page of the site and make a “nofollow” link. On the printer-friendly page, include the “nofollow” tag, which is shown below:

< a rel=“nofollow” href=“site.com/printer-friendly-page.htm”>Print or < a rel=”nofollow” href=“www.mywebsite.com/print/news1.html”>

A caveat though; despite being effective, the printer-friendly page can still be indexed when someone links it from his own website.

• Amend the robots.txt file to exclude or prohibit access to all pages in a directory. You can then you can associate all your print-friendly pages in that folder. For example if you’ve labeled your folder as “print”, you can type in the following to prevent spiders from indexing that part of the website:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /print/

To get the best protection from page printer-friendly index incidents, any two of these procedures can be utilized. Some recommend combining the first and third options, as depending on the second method alone is insufficient.

Site navigation strengthens your website as a whole and puts focus on not only your homepage but also the pages within the website. Search engines are keen towards the page level focus of the pages from within a website. Site navigation gives some kind of structure to the pages of your website. It puts focus on the webpages and guides visitors and search engines so they could navigate your website easily. It is a critical factor in search engine optimization because it ultimately decides user experience and the quality of this user experience. It guides search engines on the structure of your website and gives them the idea of what pages are higher thus more relevant than others.

Explaining the Importance of Site Navigation Further

Here are the top reasons why site navigation is critical in the SEO process:

- To give out the pages’ relationship

A website basically has a lot of pages within it. It is very seldom that we see one website where everything is contained in one page and nothing more. Usually, links are used to help visitors be guided accordingly. Also, some pages may be talking about a topic that the reader would be interested on and usually this page will have a link to another article that is related to the topic and may also interest its reader.

Establishing these relationships is also important so that search engines may be guided accordingly especially when they are ranking your pages. It shows them which pages are related rather than having their algorithms determine these themselves which is not really accurate for that matter.

- To show the pages with more relevance

When we develop our websites, not all pages will be deemed with equal relevance. That is why establishing page relationships is important. The higher the page is in the hierarchy of things indicates the stronger importance you put to it. The links that support it are merely there to provide further info for readers but the main page will always be the most important one.

- Controls User Experience

As was said above, establishing site navigation makes it easier for user to browse through your website and find whatever info they might need. Putting links to the pages of your website where they can get additional information is always a plus not only in the eyes of your customers but for search engines as well.

You can basically improve user experience by planning carefully and strategically the information architecture of your site. An easier to browse and informative website is always the best way to keep customers.

The Importance of Information Architecture

Search engines basically employ set algorithms in ranking websites. You can help your SEO cause by having well-built information architecture in place through proper site navigation techniques. This way you will not be at the mercy of the search engine bots and you would also be polishing your website structure for your visitors’ use. Web developers should always have their customers’ interests in mind.

Google AdSense and Google Analytics are just some of the most common tools web developers use to keep track of how their SEO strategies are faring in the online market. It gives them data on how well their ads are doing in terms of generating the customer traffic and revenues targeted.

Many analysts suggest that linking your AdSense account to your Google Analytics one is very advantageous. This is a very simple trick that most web developers overlook but doing so can provide with additional revenue in your ad placements.

Basic Requirements

To be able to link your AdSense to your Analytics account, a few requirements should be met. These include:

1. You have to have your own Google AdSense account and be registered as an AdSense publisher.
2. You have to have a Google analytics account for all of your sites. They should also host Google ads on them.
3. Although optional, your website has to generate enough traffic and be worth optimizing. This is why most of the developers who link their AdSense with their Analytics accounts are usually the ones who have established their websites for quite some time and are looking to take advantage of linking both accounts for additional revenue.

The Benefits of Integrating Your AdSense and Analytics Accounts

The integration you will make between these two accounts can provide you with extra information which can be valuable in adjusting your strategies with your SEO process. If your website has just been set up, the info provided by the integration may not be as valuable since yours still lack the amount of traffic needed to come up with useful conclusions. This integration is usually beneficial for established sites and can increase customer traffic and AdSense revenue at the same time.

This process can also bring about answers to some simple but important questions with regards to your SEO processes. It can give your specific data on which part of your site generates the most revenue and which parts are outputting dismal results. In this way you can readjust the said parts to be able to make all of them successful in generating revenue. You may have an elaborate plan on paper but sometimes this does not translate into the actual world. The combination of AdSense and Analytics provides you information to be able to guide you accordingly in moving forward with your SEO strategies.

The broad match modifier is a feature that can be found in the Google AdWords tool for SEO. It enables users to create keywords that will have a greater impact in the search engine results pages. It helps SEO practitioners focus their strategies on specific keywords rather than on a broader phrase or group of words. Enabling the broad match modifier in your SEO campaign will result in more clicks and conversions for your targeted keywords. It will also come at an attractive ROI, better than the usual match modifier.

To enable this setting to function, users must put a plus (+) symbol in front of their targeted keyword/s in the broad match search. If you want two keywords to be modified then you can put plus symbols in front of all the words you are targeting. For example, if you are targeting the keywords home accessories, you should put plus symbols preceding these words (i.e. +home accessories, +home +accessories, home +accessories) to enable the broad modifier setting. The words should also appear in its correct form on the user’s searches, or as a close variant.

Close variants, as defined by Google, include misspelled words (i.e. hmoe), singular or plural form of the words, abbreviations, acronyms and even stemmings (words +
-ing). Synonyms and related words are not considered close variants. Web developers, though, advise SEO practitioners to proceed with caution as the broad match modifier can have positive and negative impacts to SEO campaigns if not properly used.

If exact match keywords are being used in a campaign, then the broad match modifier can be 100% helpful. However, if you mainly use broad match keywords/phrases in your campaign, then the broad match modifier can do the opposite and come up with negative impacts. Google advises developers to maintain two sets of keywords for their campaign to cater to both systems.

The broad match modifier setting is available to Google AdWords users all over the world, in most languages that Google is available in. Updates and further announcements will be posted by the Google team in the official AdWords blog.