Site Navigation & Information Architecture Fundamentals For SEOs

One of the most confusing skills to teach someone who practices organic search engine optimization is called “information architecture” (aka “IA”). I’ve given several talks on the topic in an effort to chip away at some popular misconceptions. Each time the audience has people who refer to themselves as an SEO, IA or usability professional. Typically we’re allotted anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to discuss “successful information architecture.” Since IA is not the same for SEO and Usability (closely related however), conveying the nuances of how, why, when, where and what information architecture is to each profession feels like a disaster.

Adding to the frustration of communicating what IA is and what it’s for are terms like “mental model,” “taxonomy,” “ontology,” “wayfinder” and many more. If I were to list all the pieces of the information architecture puzzle here, it would take up too much space.

It’s easy to think that IA is all about navigation or even is navigation. It’s not navigation if you think of navigation as offering directions to get from one place to another place. Rather, it’s offering directions in a manner that depends on who or what is asking for them.

For this article, I’m going to focus on information architecture as it is used by someone who optimizes web site pages for search engines. You’ll see the connections to the usability side but the methodology I want to cover now is for the SEO.

Navigation

The screen shot below is of a real web site. What you see is the navigation scheme for the entire website. There are no drop down categories if you click on a sphere.

The internet is rife with websites with sitewide navigation using the words “about,” “services,” “solutions” and “contact.” Sadly, many of them have an SEO assigned to work on them and despite all their keyword and linking work, they ignore the words used to navigate the site. For this site, each sphere links to one page, with no categories. To learn what “solutions” are, one page explains it if you click to read it. (Just love the incentive to go do that!)

The easiest step for an SEO to correct this is to add a keyword to each link label. The most obvious choices would be the brand, specific types of services (consulting, accounting, job finding) and identifying “solutions” (or finding a more definitive word). An SEO skilled in information architecture will take it deeper. This person will want to know what the “mental model” is before picking out any keywords.

Mental model

“Mental models” represent people. And people have brains. Because they have brains, they have information and behaviors stored in their heads. We know humans are creatures of habit and many dislike change. They use commonly known words to describe different things. They’re young or old. Some are deaf. Some wear reading glasses. Maybe they can’t spell. Maybe they only get online when they’re drunk or when they can get to a public library.

Without an idea of who the people are that are expected to use a website, plain vanilla link labels like “about” and “services” are the uninspired standard. But with some mental model data, an SEO can add more zest to their keyword research. I understand that an SEO is often one of the last people to have input on page content during development. This is not a wise practice. For an SEO to create more powerful information architecture for a site, they need to know:

• Who is intended to use the site?
• How they conduct tasks?
• What do they need?
• Variables? Environment, disabilities, age, time, computer experience
• How do they think? Behave?
• User personas
• Card sorting
• User testing during prototype stage
• Analytics
• Market research
• Brain research (neurosciences)
• Human behavior

Why?

Let’s take a moment to consider first-time parents and grandparents searching for baby items. They may want to browse online inside a famous department store. When they land on the homepage, they find confusing navigation. It’s frustrating them because the navigation was laid out without regard to research into the habits and needs of customers. If you were an English speaking person taking a visitor from Japan on a tour of your home, wouldn’t it help to know their language and customs first?

In the example below, there is left sidebar navigation and another drop down menu that appears with the search function. The drop down menu offers redundant or similar link labels as the left side navigation. Which “baby” link do we choose? If you’re looking for a baby gift, do you look under “baby” or “gifts?” For clothes, would you think to try “apparel” or still stick with “baby?” What’s the purpose of the “entire site” drop down menu? Isn’t it adding confusion to the overall user experience?

An SEO might want to add expertise here. Perhaps “clothing” is more commonly used by the site’s customers than “apparel.” Are “baby gifts” something that could be put together rather than in separate categories? What if keyword research strongly suggests those two words are often searched on together?

Mechanics, IA & SEO

Information architecture for an SEO also requires getting into the mechanics of a web site. Consider a site that uses AJAX technology. The URL doesn’t change on AJAX pages. How does this effect IA?

Today, most people understand they can tell the hierarchy (directory structure) of a site by looking at a page’s URL (domain.com/directory/page.html). If that URL never changes, they’re denied this information. And of course, if they bookmark it, they’ll never know what page they bookmarked because it has no accurate identifier.

Text links still rule search engine crawlability. Therefore, an SEO must work out issues with JavaScript and image-based navigation. Link consistency is another area of focus. If a link within content points to a link in global navigation, they should be using the same terms. Navigation, from an SEO perspective, is not simply a matter of creating keyword rich categories or classes for products. What’s happening in the background ties in too, such as sitemap creation, robots exclusions, types of navigation (footer, global, side bar, breadcrumb, etc.), error page handling, internal linking and more.

The key to understanding where the mechanics fit in is to understand and rely on your mental model (who is using the site). An SEO is working on the search engine side, but search engines are dependent on user behavior.

Taxonomies & ontologies

Alan Bleiweiss did a great job working out navigation layouts with categories and sub-categories in Information Architecture – Rocket Science Simplified. He created graphics of example navigation schemes so that readers could visualize relationships, categories and classifications of terms.

“Taxonomy” refers to classification such as categories. “Ontology” means the relationships between classifications or terms. For example, a fruit basket is the classification. Apples, oranges, peaches and mangoes would be related to this classification. If a stakeholder requests that you put “car” into a fruit basket category, it’s unrelated and they need their head examined.

Another example for a taxonomy setup would be:

• Category – Music
• Subcategory – Rock
• Related terms – soft rock, hard rock, etc.

Web sites with enormous inventories face situations where relationships can overlap. Unless the information architecture is worked out beforehand, they end up with orphan pages or hubs (sections with levels) that are completely disconnected from related categories or sub-categories. Before navigation can offer a sense of place, it has to be soundly researched for link relationships, user connections based on user behavior (i.e. baby gifts, baby or gifts), mapped out and coded in the back-end. It’s not difficult to see how important sense of place might be for site visitors, but it’s just as important for search engines. A well designed IA allows search engines to link directly to top level pages that it learns are popular with searchers.

Context, organization and findability

An SEO works with content, whether writing it, creating link labels or linking between pages. While many stop at keyword research, the more skilled will evaluate context issues such whether the site is local or global, what language(s) are used and what terminology choices are the best. An information architect will determine the overall interlinking structure with the goal of creating confidence for both search engines and site visitors by establishing hierarchy and orientation via navigation. Organized page content creation consists of where it goes, how much, order of importance, what goes in and why.

“Findability,” which is another fancy word you may see tossed about, is simply how to make pages easy to search for. Short tail and long tail keyword usage factor into findability. Keep in mind that much of the clues to a fortified site IA are found in mental model research. And best of all, if something isn’t converting as desired it can be examined and changed because user and searcher mental model information is available.

95% of all search engine referrals come from page one of search results pages (SERPS). Organic marketing has been viewed as the “easy” way to market web pages. Some will insist that paying for ads and placement in SERPS is the only way to go. It’s costly and to me, not that challenging. Information architecture is more of a voyage into the art of information communication. Before one syllable of text can be found by either an intended search engine bot or a human person via navigation, we study what they want to know and how they want to find it.

Source: SearchEngineLand

Geo-Marketing As A New Business Marketing Tool

Geo-Marketing (or Geographic Marketing) is a new method of marketing a business and its website through web searches, mobile searches and social media. As you can see, the geo-marketing tools being used are digital and through the Internet or Mobile devices.

While geo-marketing’s definition is the association of data and maps in the traditional sense, the added convergence of local business listings, mobile marketing, and social media makes this method of marketing more powerful than ever before. This marketing tool is no longer just a large business marketing tool, but is available to small and medium size businesses too.

We should define what we mean by local business. A local business is any sized business dependent on the local consumer for its revenue. This means you could be a national company like Home Depot, U-Haul, or Best Buy or you could be a local florist or independent store only known to your local geography.

From a technical standpoint an Internet user’s IP address is tied to GPS data, like longitudes and latitudes, which are mapped with technology to geographies around the world down to the city and street level. While all this data may seem overwhelming, the good news is that most businesses do not need to concern themselves with this part of geo-marketing. Many of the tools already have all of this information built into their software or hardware technology so we can stay focused on how we will use geo-marketing tools.

The difficulty with any new marketing tool is a business’s inability to adopt the methodology early. When it comes to technologies and the Internet, in the past, by the time most businesses are ready to adopt a marketing tool, the industry has already moved on to something new. Being an early or at least an earlier adopter of marketing methods on the Internet and through digital devices can only benefit the business.

We have seen many signs over the past two years regarding the evolution of geographic marketing. When companies like Google, Apple, and the investment community of Wall Street start to put $100+ million and more behind a technology it will become part of our daily lives whether a business wants it or not. Consumers have and will be using more of these geo-marketing tools to find businesses, services or products near them.

Let’s take a look at the three main tools that consumers are using to find businesses, products or services close to their geography.

1. Web searches are the first and most obvious, however, these are web searches in which a map displays with targets the businesses that match the search criteria. Unlike the traditional yellow pages, these geo-listings (a.k.a. Local Business Listings) can be claimed and updated with your business marketing information in order to meet these search criteria.

While this may sound relatively easy, geo-listings also include: consumer reviews that need to be managed; the clean-up of duplicate listings; coupons; offers; discounts; videos; photos; citations; QR bar codes; and, hyper local websites. Understanding what to start with and how to strategically use these components can be done by a professional marketing firm that specializes in this area. You can read more about these components in one of our previous articles here.

2. Mobile Marketing is the next most significant geo-marketing tool in which SMS Texting, Mobile Applications, Mobile version of your website, and Mobile advertising are your key components. The starting point in this process will be with SMS Texting to get your alerts out to customers that subscribe to your short bursts of information. The reason why this is your starting point is that it will take time to build your list of subscribers.

3. Social Media Marketing continues to evolve and is, also, geographic in its targeting ability. Consumers are using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Wiki sites, Four Square, Instant Messaging and other social community tools on their mobile devices. While they use it mostly to find businesses, products and services, in the social communities they are seeking recommendations from their friends (near and far). They are, also, using these social communities to post their experiences with a business, product or service. For this reason you have to monitor the social communities in order to embrace any potential problem situations and work with them.

These three geo-marketing components are important to any business size – large or small – and each have their own sub-components that need to be well understood in order to succeed. Understanding the strategy amongst them; the acceptance and embracing them early; and, finally planning on a 3-year return will put you on the right path of geo-marketing.

Certainly your time resources are limited and Geo-Marketing Services are provided bySmartFinds Internet Marketing. You will find this to be of great benefit to your time resources and the low cost service may eliminate your yellow page ad costs. Let the experts of over 16 years Internet marketing experience help you use this local business marketing tool properly and prevent brand security issues from occurring.

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Competitive Intelligence in SEO & Social Media

Identifying the Competition

The first step in identifying your online competition is checking out the search results for your most popular keywords. Do not look only at keywords which drive the most traffic, but also your longtail keyterms and also the keyterms which convert the most sales, leads or phone calls.

By comparing the sites which you compete with in these various groups of keyterms, you will more or less identify different styles of competition that you can learn from and monitor. Here are some types of sites which may not appear for your basic keyterms in the serps, that you need to monitor.

• Affiliate sites are your competition. Not only sites which run the affiliate ads of your rivals, but also your own affiliate ads, because if they are ranking above your company’s site, they are taking money out of your pocket (or the search division’s pocket) by driving traffic and sales that you should be driving. Furthermore, affiliates don’t have to deal with internal regulations and beauracracy, so they can more or less get away with more tactics like publishing loads of content, paid linking, and taking full advantage of the social media outlets your management or PR division is not letting you tackle. Affiliates are the ninjas, mercenaries and dark armies of your industry, learn from them.
• Offline competitors sometimes don’t do the best SEO, maybe they just launch a flash site or brochure page and don’t rank at all, but they may have an advertising agency with a massive creative team building up their social media presence, hold contests or sweepstakes, build up Facebook followings, have a massive PPC budget and spend a lot of money on site advertising and sponsorships. By monitoring what the do in online advertising, you can identify keyterms and copy which work for them in their PPC campaign and also find out the sites or networks where they are serving graphic advertising, and contact those same networks about striking a deal which will assist with your SEO or linking. If your competition is serving ads there, then those sites hit your target market.

On-Site Competitive Intelligence

Now that you have identified the sites you need to monitor as part of your competitive intel strategy, now start looking into the on-site factors which help them rank in the search engines. You may find not only what they are doing right, but what you are doing wrong. When performing a competitive intel report, I suggest including your own site in the report and even having a third eye, like an SEO consultant or internal staff member, do the research on your own site.

• Site URL Structure : By tracking the URL structure and file naming structure of competitors, you can determine the best route to gain a competitive advantage over other companies.
• Site Development and Coding Structure : Which language is the site being coded in. Are there any conflicts in programming language or separate IP’s? This information is vital to SEO competitive intel.
• Use of Analytics : Is the competitor tracking user behavior and referrals via Google Analytics, Hitbot, Omniture? Looking into their analytics systems help give an idea of how much information they are capturing from their visitors and how advanced their internal tracking is – which may define how advanced their SEO team is.
• The directory files and URL structures of listings pages : This will be used to determine which techniques these competitors are using for their individual pages, their content, meta and URL structures, and how these reflect in the Google, Yahoo and MSN rankings.
• Page Title and META Title Review: Page titles are one of the most influential HTML elements used in an optimization campaign. Since the optimization of this variable is connected to rankings and actual links in the Search Engine Results Pages (or “SERPs”), an analysis has been conducted to provide which sites use a preferred title structure and which just use repetition of their company name.
• META Tag Review (Description / Keywords): META tags have limited relevance to rankings, but do play a part in that search results often feature the META Description tag. Knowing this, an optimized description that instigates action from the searcher is preferred. Further, integrating the targeted keywords allows for them to be bold or otherwise emphasized in the listings – which helps to convert more clicks in the SERPs through to the optimized site.
• Navigational System Review: Search engines spider, or seek out new content based on the links they find to resources on a page. Navigation systems are the most consistent manner for building internal link popularity, so research evaluates the overall strength of these systems used. For example, a Flash based navigational system is horrible for SEO, whereas consistent keyword driven links with keywords integrated are optimal.
• Broken Links : If a site has broken links, broken files or lists non-existant pages, then Google will lower the ranking of that site because the engine believes that the site is under construction. Run a link check using Xenu Link Sleuth to see if your competition is overlooking such linking and internal navigation issues.
• HTML Code Validity: Using the W3C Validation tools, your competitors’’ web sites have been reviewed. This allows the engines to promote sites that deliver a consistent and predictable user experience. Run each site through the validation tool, and reported back the number of errors noted.
• Design & SEO Integration: Similar to the internal navigational structure, the use of some HTML elements are preferred over others for SEO purposes. Our research and analysis of competing site designs have been provided in this document.

Offsite Competitive SEO Elements

Not only do onsite tactics assist with the ranking of a website, but sometimes more importantly offsite tactics can benefit the competitive advantage to boost a site from the bottom of the front page on Google, to the top three traffic driving positions.

By monitoring offsite SEO tactics, and social media tactics, you can get a rounded feel for the link building strategies your competitors are using, their participation in blogs, sites they may own which are harnessing social media equity and directing it to their main site, if paid linking is working for them, and how they’re doing on Delicious, Digg and in vertically targeted social networks. All of these factors have a direct influence on search engine rankings and you will not only learn what your competition is doing, but what they are not. And by identifying these holes, oversights or even genius ideas … and applying them to your marketing strategy, you can further excel within your industry.

• Local Listings : Determine the local SEO listings that your competition has made on Yahoo Local, Citypages, BOTW Local, MSN Live and other local search engines or local profiles. These differ from the results shown in organic web search sometimes and can be an indicator of local seo techniques used or overlooked by the competition.
• Number of Inbound Links: Using Yahoo! Site Explorer, report on the number of inbound links to each of the analyzed web sites. As a rule, the more links and the more relevancy – the better. Search Engines like Google use inbound links to help shape the overall level of authority of a web site.
• Linkbait or Viral Marketing : How are these competitors building links? Are they running link baiting programs and actively having articles submitted to Digg & StumbleUpon? Are they using any Viral Marketing techniques like videos, widgets or badges which link back to them and assist with their rankings. Dig into their campaigns to find out what they are using, and monitor the social networks to identify future social linking campaigns.
• Social Media : Do they actively use social media to market their business? Does their company have a Wikipedia page? How do they rank for their own brand name and are social profiles served in these results? Have they even secured their brand across social networks? Do they distribute online video? This research will help determine a social media plan and also identify competitive advantages that you can use to your advantage.
• Blogging : Do these companies blog and who is doing their blogging? Are the blogs on a subdomain, a whole other website or in an internal directory file. How often do they post? How many subscribers will they have? This information will assist you construct your blogging strategy and possibly unearth some ideas.
• Paid Link Research: It is difficult to say with certainty that an inbound link has been purchased. There are however signs where common systems like Paid Directories and Link Networks are used on a site. Research of inbound, paid links to your competitors from sidebars, ads on newspaper sites or bad paid linking in footer links may give you some insight as to which anchors they are targeting and what is working for them.
• Site visits and Traffic : Using a mix of data from Alexa, Compete and other web traffic estimation tools, estimate the traffic of the competitors in terms of visitors, time spent on site, top referrals and other information driven by third party tools.
• Page Rank and other Metrics : Compile a list of competitive metrics including Google PageRank, SEOmoz PageStrength, Delicious Bookmarks, StumbleUpon voting, Google Page Indexing, Google Competitive Indexing.
• Competitive Rankings : Last but not least, run a ranking check using a search engine friendly software for each of the terms which you have determined for targeted SEO keyterms via your comeptitive research. Check the rankings for these sites and terms in Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Bing and maybe some engines which are used specifically by your industry.

This may sound like a lot of information to monitor, and you’ll probably want to add more industry specific metrics to your research dependent upon how SEO savvy your market is. But in the long run by documenting this information now, and revisiting it once a quarter, you will have a pinpoint idea of the tactics your search rivals are utilizing, what they are not, and even what they are picking up.

7 Simple Geo Targeting Tips for Your Site.

7 Simple Geo Targeting Tips for Your Site.

How do they do this?

By looking at a number of factors, such as:.

• Country-specific domain name – eg. .com or .com.au or .co.uk etc. etc.
• Where your site is hosted – be careful with this as a lot of hosting providers may have their offices in one country, but use servers and equipment based overseas.
• Language used in your website content - even things like UK English vs. US English can make a difference due to spelling and colloquialisms.Inbound Links to your site – are they mainly from other Australian websites, US sites, UK sites etc.
• Listing of your address / location / phone number on your website.
• Location of people who look at your site – if your site has more traffic from Australian visitors it is likely to rank better in Google.com.au than it would in Google.com.

Knowing the above information makes it a lot easier to perform a Geo Targeting audit on your site. Here are the things I would do:

1. If you run an Australian website and your main customers / clients are other Australians, spend the few extra dollars and buy a .com.au domain name. If you’re targeting clients in the UK, buy a .co.uk. etc. etc.
2. Apply the same logic (as above) to the web hosting – spend a few extra dollars to have your website hosted in the country that you are targeting.
   Be sure to check that your hosting provider uses equipment based in your country too. If you still aren’t certain you can check their IP’s using SEOmoz’s IP Location Tool.
3. Take the time to check your spelling and use the type of wording your clients will understand and are familiar with.
   For example the term swimwear, swimsuit, beachwear, cozzies, bathers and togs all mean the same thing but people in Queensland, Australia (where I’m from) rarely use the term bathers or cozzies – we wear ‘togs’.
4. An inbound link is like a personal referral or testimonial for your website. Having links from other relevant local sites will be far more valuable with Geo Targeting than having lots of inbound links from overseas sites.
5. Submit your site to local business and local search directories – this can often be one of the easiest methods of attracting local links and local traffic.
   As a rule-of-thumb, just make sure the directory presents well and that you are comfortable being listed amongst the other sites that are in the directory. If you think the directory isn’t great quality, you’re probably right and it should be avoided.
6. Mention your address, location and contact details in the footer of each page – this is one of the easiest things to do which can help tell your clients and the search engines that you are a local business.
   The only time this doesn’t really help is if you have offices in multiple locations. Mentioning a dozen countries / cities in the footer won’t do much for your local profile in each of those places. If this is the case you should build separate sites (or at the very least separate pages) for each location.
7. Build your brand locally as you will usually rank well for your business name before you’ll start ranking for more competitive terms.
   Ensure you promote your site through off-line advertising methods, which can be as simple as including your website on your business cards, letterheads and other corporate stationary.
   This will help you gain local search traffic and as mentioned above, if your site has more traffic from Australian visitors it is likely to rank better in Google.com.au than it would in Google.com.

GEO-targeting Analysis.

GEO-targeting SEO doesn’t end at SEO-targeting promotion. To fully understand visitor behaviors of each GEO market, try using geographic Meta data for accurate results. Several Boston Internet marketing companies have used Web analytic software and IP databases that provide a range of locations for specific requirement when a version of a web site or advertisements need to reach only a specific city within the states.

GEO-targeting Design.

Websites targeting multiple GEO regions may have a few versions of the site. And each version targets one particular language. For the same version, the page may be configured according to the location automatically. It’s a common practice to use IP address to identify the geo region of a visitor. For design of each version, make sure to work closely with the designers who really know about that market. The design of the website should suit the style and taste of the local users. A website targeting US market has much better chance of success if a Boston web design company is involved, instead of a web design firm from India. Geo-targeting depends on the user’s settings. As an example, an English web site may display different versions according to the user’s location, whether Canada, Australia or the United Kingdom, since Geo-targeting identifies the user’s keyword settings, language and location.

GEO-targeting Promotion.

All major search engines serve the search results based on both what users are looking for (the quires) and where they come from (location). In fact, major search engines Google, Yahoo Search!, and Microsoft’s Live search all have a different version of the main search engine for either major language or a country. A searcher from UK will see the different search results than a searcher from Australia even though they use the same search engine and search for the same term. Search engines rank pages according to what kind of links a site is pointed and where the links are from. If a website site gets most of links from UK, the site will rank well when UK users look for information in a search engine. If you’re not located in the GEO market you target, work with a local SEO firm is productive and rewarding. A Boston internet marketing company that really knows about Boston SEO will do a much better job for acquiring links from either US sites or Boston local websites.

Courtesy: SEO-NEWS

How Long Should It Take for SEO to Show Results?

The typical question that gives many SEO professionals a bit of a gut-check is, “How long will it take for you to show me results?” Typically, the answer will vary based on the age of the site in question and the level of competition for high volume keywords, if boiling it down to two major factors.

However, there are considerably more elements to a fully-fledged answer. These are also split into new vs. redesigned or reformatted (URL) Web site.

When dealing with a brand new domain, it will likely be difficult to gain the necessary “trust” for rankings for broad competitive terms for at least three months, but often closer to six to nine months. This isn’t always as clear cut — if you have and continue to put out useful content, and if you’re fortunate to benefit immediately from authoritative and consistent links (or are willing to cheat), you could see results sooner.

Of course, if your technical infrastructure doesn’t support good crawling of your pages and understanding of your content, you’ll be dead in the water before you even start.

When dealing with either redesigns or post-launch SEO, the best thing to do is never give, or accept, a response “from the cuff.” Setting unrealistic expectations will only lead to disappointment. Not only should people take time to project the best and worst possible scenarios, but these projections should be updated post-launch at least once, as crawling and indexing patterns get established.

How Quickly Do Search Engines Crawl/Index a Redesigned Site?

Recently, we helped relaunch a fairly large site with thousands of pages. A major directory level was gone, and it wasn’t possible to implement all redirects prior to launch.

Within 12 hours, Google had indexed and was returning well over 1,000 of the new pages in its results. We started seeing a few dozen new pages in each directory level off the root that we were monitoring, within about four hours after launch. I can’t claim as dominant of a performance by Yahoo, and look forward to our first Bing-monitoring, which has to be better than the last.

The catch to this process is that, at the same time, the search engines are ridding themselves of any no-longer used URLs, through new robots.txt files, 404 errors, and in a pattern that appears to indicate an “as we can” programming attitude. They will also continue to index those with rankings, fortunately.

If the site relies on a lot of home page rankings for top keywords, then a redesign usually won’t hurt, even if the new home page URL now resolves to the root instead of a prior directory-appended version, based on a number of sites.

How Difficult is it to Maintain Current Rankings After Launch?

For new domains, brand terms should rank nearly immediately after the first crawl — maybe not first however, as Rosetta experienced after launching and finding Apple and the language software ahead. A unique brand name should have relatively no problem ranking number one very soon.

Benchmarking is crucial to understanding how post-redesign crawling behavior is treating a Web site. Monitoring “cherry” keywords, such as the top 10 to 50-plus branded and non-branded referring terms, and measuring them by search engine, can give you insight into this.

This is also an important high-level indicator of how much the search engines initially trust your new domain structure. It happens a lot quicker when you’re shifting URLs on the same root domain, than when you’re moving to a new one.

How is Traffic Affected After Launch?

The classic answer to this question is often unfortunately accurate. There’s always going to be at least a slight drop in traffic, even with SEO.

On a percentage basis, this can equal dozens, or even hundreds of traffic-driving rankings. The better you do with maintaining your high-volume keywords, the more likely the dip may be being caused by other factors as well, including an unexpected or seasonal dip in branded traffic.

The best ally in monitoring post-launch success rate is, of course, analytics. As long as it’s been properly configured, very important data can be gleaned from 404 reports and high-bounce pages or referrers. Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer are important allies in the quest for new or continued rankings.

Lastly, level of implementation is probably the single worst enemy to SEO success. Lack of SEO implementation is so dangerous because even what seems like the smallest de-prioritization during a launch cycle can often be a very big wrench in the spokes.

In a partnership with an SEO provider, or in dealing with your own SEO team, you have to remember the “fear of flying” analogy. If you’re afraid of flying, simply ask your captain if he’s planning to get you there safely. Chances are very likely that any partner you entered into an arrangement with, and even more so an internal SEO team, is just as concerned about ranking and performance as you are.

For a new site, the first goal should be to rank for brand and potentially some local or other modified long tail searches. Give the process time and continued attention, and rankings should be visibly rising after six months.

For redesigns, the primary first goal should be to maintain current rankings for high-traffic terms immediately post-launch. Next, establish that your optimization is in place and start working to develop trust in the new pages and understand how the search engine sees them. From this, you can either increase or decrease your expectations for incremental success over the old site.

Frank Watson Fires Back

Interesting mate — length of time it takes to get ranked is always something you get asked, and it is a hard one to answer. Competitiveness, domain age, and brand level are the three things I look for at the start — after that it becomes an endless endeavor.

Using existing analytics can help, but many times you’re implementing them as well. One of my clients put bonus conditions on getting ranked on front page — left him after six months, then a couple months later many of the bonus terms popped into place. They just don’t get the idea of time in our industry.