Yes your monthly search engine ranking report currently rank in all major search engine like Google, Yahoo and MSN, but where does your traffic comes from? Is it from other site? Perhaps in a paid versus organic search? What about RSS feeds / e-mail / affiliates?

Measuring what sources are driving the highest quantity and quality visits to your site is one of the fundamentally most important (and easiest!) things a web analyst can do.

Your traffic sources report usually doesn’t look much different than this:

Then if you’re really lucky you get a slick visual summary of that data in the form of a pie chart!

Here are some useful tips I’ve found for really getting insight out of your traffic sources reporting :

• Decide on your sources

• Set up tracking on your sources

• Report and find those insights!

• Go ask for that raise!

Learn more about these practical and powerful tips. See how it was presented in a way which provides insight and analysis. Read more –>

Comscore have released some interesting stats regarding the different types of universal results in the Google search results page (SERP).

source: http://www.comscore.com

James Lamberti draws the conclusion that the popularity of video is mostly driven by a combination of consumers and Google itself. However I’d disagree, and argue that Google is not responsible at all, simply Google is responding to what the consumer market is naturally demanding.

It would make sense that this would lead to a greatly increased volume in entertainment traffic as the nature of web usage changes, and thus an increasing popularity of video and YouTube in universal search results. Looking at the popularity of YouTube beyond Google this also matches our research into social bookmarking service DIGG.com which showed that YouTube was by far the website that reached the homepage of DIGG most frequently.

Definitely this will be an ongoing trend, and would not be surprised to see YouTube taking an even more prominent place on Google in the future.

Social media can be loosely defined as the movement of community contributions in an effort to help one another and improve search engine ranking. There’s plenty of giving, taking, promoting, and marketing. In an effort to also contribute, here are 5 great ways to contribute to social media from ReadWriteWeb.

Provide Fresh Content - Being able to provide a fresh perspective on the news goes a long way to helping out with social media. Every thought and opinion is unique even if all parties agree.

Spread the Link Love - Spreading the link love is actually one of the best things you can do for social media. Not only does it help with networking, but for social media this is a great way for users to find great content.

Roll Your Own - What’s revolutionary about social media content is that it can be based on standards like RSS and XML. To quote Phil Glockner of Scribkin, “this lends a lot of re-interpretation of the data available for the taking.”

Share Your Findings - Since applications can serve a multitude of purposes for users, your reasons for using one app could be used for entirely different reasons by someone else. However, the discovery of these purposes can’t happen unless you continue to share.

Stay Active - While it’s perfectly fine to be a lurker, if something strikes your interest, don’t be afraid to voice your opinions and share your knowledge of the subject.

Sharing Really is Caring - These are just a handful of great ways to contribute to social media. Keep in mind that contributions to social media are also beneficial for other niches and the web community overall.

I totally agree with these. With social media and social networking spreading like wildfire people should be looking towards things like Facebook, Multiply, Connect and BlogIt and Google Friend Connect.

Search Engine Optimizer Aaron Wall put up an extensive, multi-angled analysis of the worth of a top Google ranking.

Google Ranking and Pagerank are probably the most important algorithms ever developed for the Web. With billions of existing pages and millions of pages generated every day, the search issue in the Web is more complex than you probably think it is. PageRank, only one of hundreds of factors used by Google to determine best search results, helps to keep our search clean and efficient.

When planning and researching your keywords to target for either pay per click advertising campaigns or on-page keyword focus within your content, most marketers don’t realize they are leaving a lot of potential keyword options on the table. What’s more, these alternative keywords are often less expensive to purchase or less competitive to target in the search engine ranking. Why is this? Because too many people take what keywords the various keyword tools give them to heart. There is a huge wealth of traffic to be gleaned by targeting variations of your top chosen keywords other than the crucial part which is misspellings, there are more areas to look at;

·         Acronyms - are words that are creating by using letters from a multiword phrase. For example, SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization and PPC is an acronym for Pay Per Click. Abbreviations and slang would also fall into this category as well.

·         Hyphens - is it pay per click or pay-per-click? Again, this is a term where both variations seem to be accepted. Make sure that you are taking advantage of any hyphen versus no-hyphen in your own market.

·         Also those fun keywords that fall into multiple variations, such as BBQ, barbeque, barbecue, Bar-B-Q, Bar-b-que. Let’s hope you are using them in a PPC campaign rather than optimizing for all those variations for organic search results.

·         Synonyms - refer to two completely different keywords that either mean the same thing or are very closely related, such as soda versus pop versus soda pop. If you were a drink company, you would need to ensure you optimize for all three, since what people call it varies by region in the US not to mention worldwide.

·         Plurals - even though some might consider this the most obvious keyword variation to target. For example, you would want to use both mortgage and mortgages as well as both restaurant and restaurants. You would be missing out on a lot of traffic if you only target the singular or the plural and not the other.

Finding and researching keyword variations is something that many marketers still miss out on when selecting keywords for both organic and paid results. By utilizing the above tips for finding variations, you might discover an entire keyword set with high volume yet still low competition by your competitors for both organic search results and within the pay per click market as well.

You can read more about this topic here.

In an effort to differentiate themselves from competitors, many SEO/SEM firms come up with interesting unique selling propositions (USPs). Some SEO/SEM firms emphasize search engine ranking and advertising to create quite useful tools to help manage PPC campaigns. Some SEO firms specialize in training, again creating tools that help newbie and experienced SEO professionals optimize existing web pages.

However, do SEO professionals really “get” website usability, and is it a benefit for website owners to hire such firms to promote their company or organization sites in the commercial web search engines? Below are the opinions from a well-known SEO’s about “What should SEO professionals know about usability?”

Usability testing and SEO

“The word usability serves as a boundary object that invites diverse communities of practice to share experiences and negotiate solutions,” said Peter Morville, President of Semantic Studios and author of the renowned books, Information Architecture for the WWW and Ambient Findability. “For instance, as an information architect who consults with major corporations, it’s vital for me to understand usability heuristics and perform usability tests, but it’s equally essential that I go beyond usability.”

Heuristic analysis and SEO

The goal of a heuristic evaluation is to usability problems early in the design of a Web site so that improvements can be made as part of the iterative design process (Source: http://www.usability.gov/methods/heuristiceval.html). Though Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich came up with some outstanding guidelines in the early 90s, their research and others’ continues to evolve, as web site usability is an iterative process.

Conclusion

Both website usability and SEO/SEM are iterative processes, meaning that methodology based on a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining a work in progress (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterative_design). At the heart of iterative design is the objective observation of interaction between users and an interface: not focus groups, not web analytics, and not an SEO professionals’ personal opinion about website usability.

[via Searchengineland] Shari Thurow is the Founder and SEO Director at Omni Marketing Interactive and the author of the book Search Engine Visibility.

Once you have launched your own business blog, how can you use it as an effective marketing tool to promote your company? All it takes is a few carefully honed strategies and ideas. It is becoming more and more important for corporations - as well as businesses of all sizes like Keyphrasesearchmarketing.com, to have a blog in today’s world where so many people own computers.

I’ve read a blog from a Search Engine Marketing Consultant, Jennifer Sleg and she listed the reasons why people should really be blogging, and how it can be advantageous to their overall business marketing strategy. Here are some advantages if you’re using your blog as a marketing tool;

Controlling the message
Public Relations tends to want to run far, far away from blogs. But now, more are embracing blogs as a way to control the company’s message and how they release it. You can now have a fireside chat with your company’s CEO in the format of a blog interview, where responses can be monitored.

Excitement and anticipation
Companies can easily use a blog to give hints and tidbits about new product releases or services well before the actual launch so you can get people excited about what you are going to announce before you did it.

Fresh content
Having a blog adds new fresh original content to your site every time the blog is updated. And since this is something many corporate sites struggle with, it means you can add quality content as often as you like.

Reminding
When you have people subscribed to your company blog, those are all people who will think of your company as a household name or brand everytime you post a new blog entry.

In the business world, company owners and employees use them to develop deeper relationships with customers and prospects. For all these reasons, corporate blogs are becoming more and more popular for companies, as long as you are approaching your blog in the right way, it can be an invaluable marketing tool. If you are strategizing and getting ready to launch a corporate blog, 20 Best Practices for Launching a Corporate Blog is a must read. And if you already have a company blog, you might find Why Your Company or Corporate Blog is Failing useful.

Many companies are taking a much more serious look at Search Engine Optimization as an effective growth technique for their websites. But after investing in an SEO exercise, how will you determine if your efforts paid off? Yes, you’ve done a good job of picking a few metrics that allows you to measure your success in driving traffic to the site organically but what you’re not measuring is what the traffic does.

[via brucelay] Time to kick off the Search Analytics track here at eMetrics. Brian Klais (Netconcepts) and Richard Zwicky (Enquisite) will be taking charge of this one with Mike Grehan and his famous stick moderating.

Essential KPIs for Search Engine Ranking Optimization:

1. Brand to Non-Brand Ratio

2. Unique Pages

3. Yielding Pages

4. Phrases per Page

5. Visitors per Page

6. Page Placement

7. Engine Yield Rate

8. Natural Search Sales

9. Brand Reach

Brian thinks it’s a strategy worth experimenting with. Vanessa Fox is in the audience and advises everyone to go read our interview with her from last week where she talks in depth about PageRank sculpting.

SEO expert colleague Nima Asar Haghighi (check out his blog) have been trying to determine what are the Key Performance Indicators for measuring Search Engine Optimization. Also, a top secret tip from Vanessa Fox that you should definitely have a peek at, a few new ones that you can choose to add to your SEO dashboard! Six Questions With Vanessa Fox.