If you are doing your own search engine optimization or even you have have hired an SEO firm, then you’ll want to make sure that you measure certain data to determine whether or not your SEO efforts are paying off. There are all sorts of data that you can measure, but I’ve narrowed down the list to the ones that absolutely are essential data sets for every business owner or marketer to measure.

1. Sales, Leads aka Conversions – At the end of the day all of your online and offline marketing efforts come down to increasing and generating sales for your business. Often many times people tend to loose sight of this key aspect and how truly important it is. The only difference is that search engine optimization is a long term and on going. Have patience and measure your sales and conversion increase over time.
2. Organic Website Visitors – Tied directly into increasing conversions, over time the key measurable area is how many visitors is your website receiving as a result of your SEO efforts. This means out of all of the keyword phrases that you targeted on your website how many organic (from the 3 major search engines) visitors is your website getting. A simple way to break down the return on investment for this is to add up your monthly SEO service fee or your time (if doing your SEO on your own) and divide the into the money spent. Along with sales this is a good way to gauge how well things are going. I often explain to my SEO clients that if you are spending $5 on average per click for your PPC advertising (although not directly apples to apples with SEO visitors) but if you organic visitors on average cost $.25 then things are looking pretty good!
3. Keyword Rankings – By keyword rankings I mean the actual search engine rankings of each page on your site for each keyword that is important to that page. If you have a 10-page website and each page has a primary and a secondary keyword that it has been optimized for, that’s 20 keyword rankings you should concern yourself with. Over the past several years keyword positioning has started to diminish as a key goal (I am so glad!). With universal search, social search and the keyword rankings that fluctuate sometimes daily based on datacenter and visitor location, this is still an important measurement, but 3rd on my list.
4. Indexed Web Pages – How many pages you have indexed at each search engine is important. If your website has 100 pages published and you have 90 pages indexed at Google, 94 pages indexed at Yahoo!, 52 at Bing, and 87 at Ask, you’ve got a red flag. That 52 pages at Bing needs to be looked at more critically. Why only 52? Why isn’t Bing indexing more pages? Keep an eye on this metric and make sure that your pages are getting indexed.
5. Inbound Links – Finally, the number of relevant inbound links your site has, and each page has, point to it. Obviously, link building is important so make sure your links are getting counted by Google webmaster tools. Also, be sure to build your links the right ways, through highly relevant incoming links from many different sources, over time.

Do you know how long it takes before you can disappear from the search engine indexes completely? The technical answer is: As long as it takes for the search robots to return to your site. The real answer is, It could be just a few hours. The search engines will return to your website to crawl it and index new pages and content every time you update it. If you update your site often then you’ll likely get crawled often. Once you train the website robots to return to your site every few hours or so then they will do so by habit. They’ll get used to new content on your site and may even crawl it if you haven’t updated it.

On the other hand, if you never update your website then you’ll slip in the rankings. That slipping, however, will likely be a gradual falling away. But it really depends on how often your competition updates their websites. But the real serious issue is when your site is taken off line completely. If you take your site down for maintenance or to update it, or to clean out malware – for any issue really – and fail to republish it in a reasonable amount of time, when the search engine robots go to crawl that site and find no content, you’ll be de-listed. When will that be exactly? No one knows.

Technically, it will be on a quasi-scheduled bot appearance determined by how often the robots typically crawl your site. If they show up every six hours then it will likely be about that long, give or take, since the last crawl. Again, it depends on how often you typically update your site.

The lesson here is don’t take your site off line for an extended period of time. Otherwise, when you do republish it, you’ll find yourself clawing to get back to the rankings you had when you were de-listed and it could derail all of your hard word and ongoing search engine optimization efforts. It won’t take as long to regain what you lost as it did to get it in the first place, but why would you want to go through that?

If you have to take your site down then at least work on getting those social networking profiles built up. Diversify your presence online so that if you lose one site then you’ll have plenty others to take its place.

One of the most important elements of web marketing is search engine optimization and a very important aspect of that is your listing in the search engines. It’s important to understand that Google does not use your meta data for ranking purposes. However, your meta data is important for Google in its display of your site within the rankings. Two of the most important meta tags are the Title tag and Description tag. Your Title tag appears in Google SERPSs as a blue clickable link in large font size above your Description, what Google calls the snippet.

Google’s primary concern is delivering quality content to searchers. If you don’t provide good Titles and Descriptions for that purpose then Google will substitute your information for something it deems more useful to searchers. In your meta title tag you should provide the most important keyword for the page you are optimizing, but don’t stuff it with keywords that you want to rank for. That will work against your. Also, don’t make your Title too long or Google will rewrite it. You don’t want it to be more than 60 characters.

In your meta description tag you also want to use your most important keyword for the page and possibly a secondary keyword. Again, don’t stuff it with keywords you hope to get ranked for. Also, don’t make it too long. 160 characters or less is optimal for a meta description tag.

You need to also understand that your Google snippet will be different based on a searcher’s search query. That means Google will not always use your meta description. But if you provide quality content on your web page then no matter what search query a searcher uses the snippet will always come from your page. If your content is not helpful or less than reasonable quality then Google could replace it with its own description of your site. That’s a good reason to make sure every sentence of your web page is of the highest quality.

If you write your web page content and meta data with quality and your visitors in mind then you can maintain control over your Google SERP listings. Don’t be careless with your content.

If you are planning to move an old website to a new domain name then conventional wisdom says to redirect the old domain name to the new so that you can capture visitors still attempting to visit that old website. Sometimes I do recommend going against this conventional wisdom, but there is one instance when redirecting an old name just doesn’t make sense. If your old website isn’t getting any traffic, or the traffic that it does get is so small that you can’t justify the $10/year expense to hold onto it, then you might as well just let the old domain expire. The exception in this case is if the domain name is one that you want to hold onto and you plan to develop later for re branding purposes. Otherwise, a website with no traffic or low traffic isn’t going to benefit you with a redirect.

How long you’ve had the old domain does make a difference, however. If it’s a ten year old domain then it’s valuable even without the traffic (though a domain that old likely has a good stream of traffic). If it’s a fairly young domain then redirecting might not make sense.

Another consideration is how many links you have pointing to that domain name. If you’ve engage in a strong link building campaign and you have several thousand inbound links to that domain, but those links aren’t generating traffic, you might still consider a redirect. Many links sit in a dormant state for months or years before they start sending quality traffic. That’s because a new website has not built up its reputation yet, but as it grows and increases its own reputation among its target audience, that audience will come to trust it more and visitors will click on that’s website’s links more often. So just because you have links that are not generating traffic today does not mean they won’t be generating traffic a year or two years from now.

Even when considering whether to redirect your traffic from one domain to another, you’ve got to think long term. In most cases, a redirect can be beneficial, but there are times when it won’t hurt you to let your domains expire.

Often times I get phone calls from potential clients that start off telling me how they are looking for search engine optimization services and begin to ask for certain requirements on the strategy side of things. There is nothing wrong with that except that some of the requests look more like a recipe for a science project than actually online marketing efforts to help grow a business.

Since when did building a business online go from a traditional marketing mind set to a formula? Yes the search engines run on a mathematical algorithm but approaching the process of building an online business through quantitative efforts is not exactly the best approach. What if you hire a search engine optimization expert and they make the strategy look like a giant science project with no actual marketing elements? Sure you might get some keyword rankings but if your website has not one conversion marketing aspect on it corrected all the rankings in the world will not get your site to convert well or even at all. Major announcements have come out recently regarding significant changes in the ways that search results pull information and I can bet that this type of science project approach to search engine optimization is going to go away very soon. Since the day the search engines where introduced to the public the engineers have been working hard to clean up search results and get rid of websites that take scientific approaches like this. Long term search engine optimization is about creating in bound marketing efforts with quality content. Having well campaigned viral marketing efforts sweep through an industry like a giant wave or have well written articles, so well written that every online magazine and blog just has to write about it. This is what search marketing is all about, not how many PR3 links you can get in one month.

The definition of SEO is partially the fault of the search engines. Certain changes are consistently being made making everyone shift their focuses in other directions. It fundamentally starts at the search engine so if they allow it what else can you really do but follow the path that has been paved. This is the reason why so many businesses are just worried about rankings which is a horrible way to approach your online business. If your search engine marketing strategy for your company looks like something out of a chemistry class I think it might be time to rethink your plan a little bit. Some of the best SEO approaches have a strong emphasis and marketing and branding. Those three elements combined can go much farther than just rankings.

Link building is one of the most important tasks for any webmaster or marketer that is looking for long term search engine optimization growth. Google has taught us all that. But what about Bing? Now that Microsoft has waged a third quarter blitz to gain some competitive advantage against its arch nemesis, the folks in charge of indexing websites at Bing want to make sure we all understand the best practices for building inbound links to our websites.

The good news is it’s not a far cry different than building links for Google. The bad news is it’s not a far cry different than building links for Google.

Let me explain that. First, a little snippet from the Bing blog:

Bing’s position on link building is straightforward – we are less concerned about the link building techniques used than we are about the intentions behind the effort. That said, techniques used are often quite revealing of intent.

That’s pretty much Google’s take as well. Rather than focusing on good technique versus bad technique, the search engines are more concerned with why webmasters perform certain tasks. That’s why one technique may work well for some webmasters, but get other webmasters flagged for spam. So how does Bing know whether you have good intentions or bad?

That’s the same question that many people have been asking of Google for several years now. And the answer is just as muddled as the answer for good technique/bad technique.

Again, from the Bing blog:

The webmasters who create end user value within their websites, based on the needs of people, are the ones who will see their page rank improve. So where does that value come from? Content. Good, original, text-based content.

In essence, all good link building starts with good content. That’s true for Bing and Google alike.

It’s refreshing to see Bing get serious about link building quality. That hasn’t always been the case. I think the people at Bing have spent a few years studying Google from the inside out. As a result, they’ve modeled some of their own indexing and ranking practices on Google’s policies. The result for Bing is a better search engine and more respect from the SEO community. So what about link building for Bing? What makes a good link?

Well, from their own blog, here’s the bucket list:

• Seek links from relevant sites
• Seek out high authority websites
• Stay natural

The same old message we’ve heard from Google, right? Yes.

And to answer the How question, here’s what Bing says (again from the blog):

• Develop your brand
• Let relevant industry people with blogs and websites know of your website
• Publish optimized online press releases
• Do some article marketing
• Participate in blogs and forums
• Build relationships through social media
• Create an online newsletter
• Write a blog
• Join some industry associations
• Become a trusted expert in your niche

Sound familiar? If it does then it’s probably because you’ve been listening to what the folks at Google and the thousands of SEOs (including me) have been saying about link building for the past ten years (or five years at least).

The good news is, Bing’s list of link building best practices is the same as what we’ve all been saying for some time now. The bad news? Bing isn’t being particularly innovative here. But then, they shouldn’t be.

Search engine optimization is one of those things that if you are starting it up now you might be a bit late to the party, but at least you got there. It is important to really get started as soon as possible and get things going with your SEO efforts because each day a business waits to get active in the search engines is another day your competition might be really ramping up their search engine marketing efforts slowly stealing away valuable visitors away from your business. In today’s marketplace, businesses large and small cannot wait before they concentrate on their SEO program.

Here are some things that can happen if an established company waits on building a solid SEO program:

1. Time: SEO is a very time intensive effort that really requires patience so the longer a business waits with their website the longer it takes to really see results. SEO is a lot like planting a seed and watching it grow so if you want to see results from your efforts they are not going to happen over time. There are cost effective ways to get things started if you are on a budget so at the very least it is important to get the ball rolling. Many businesses are under the impression that search engine optimization works immediately or soon thereafter and this couldn’t be further from the truth.

2. Loss of Sales: Not performing search engine optimization efforts for your business or website will result in a direct loss of potential sales. I don’t care what your business is if you are trying to promote yourself online and you have some sort of business to offer whether online or through a brick & mortar you will benefit from SEO in some sort of way. A loss of potential website visitors is a loss of potential sales in my book. The opportunity costs of not getting active in the search engines for some businesses could be very high and almost painful to discuss.

3. More Competition: All it takes is another few websites to pop up in the search engines and start promoting themselves through a variety of search engine marketing efforts and you might really get buried into no mans lands in the search results. Not to mention your potential customers that could be lost to this newly found competition. More and more people in today’s marketplace are really starting to head online for newly found streams of income. It is important to realize that the potential for your space to get crowded online is very possible. If it hasn’t gotten busy already image if a handful of new competitors move into your space in the search engines and bump you out of the way? What would that do for your business?