Yesterday Google announced that their webmaster tools would now be displaying relatively accurate back link data. So we rushed in to take a look and viola there was this new tab at the top between statistics and sitemaps called links.

It's best to familiarize yourself with your own site's data but here is quick review.

• Google now shows external links - "This table provides a list of pages on http://www.vkistudios.com/ that have links pointing to them from other sites. Click the number in the External links column to see a sample list of links to the page."
• Google now shows internal links - "This table provides a list of pages on http://www.vkistudios.com/ that have links pointing to them from other internal pages. Click the number in the Internal links column to see a sample list of links to the page."

You can even export the data to a CVS spreadsheet for further analysis and sorting.

Big note from Matt Cutt's Blog (Google Guy) "Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight" In other words, just because Google is reporting the link does not mean that their algorithm is passing any credit along to your site based on that link. I wonder if Google will report the no follow links? We may have to do a test to see.

This is big news, and is really helpful from an SEO perspective. Now we can easily see which pages in our site has the most link reputation (externally) and we can also evaluate the same thing internally. Right away I found some interesting things. One of our least important pages (a page I would rarely if ever check the links on) had thousands of links from one domain name. When I investigated further it appeared to be some sort of arbitrage site (a spammy, scrapper site with Adsense). So not only will this new tool help you analyze your SEO efforts, but it will help you find potential SEO problems and other "black hat" issues you may not have been aware of before.

This year VKI Studios and our staff are trying to get to know more of the consultants and agencies who make up the Internet marketing, usability and analytics industry.

As an example, when we joined the WAA (Web Analytics Association) this year, I asked the executive director what would be the best way to get to know more of the members and he recommended that I participate on the nomination committee. So here I am. If you think that you would make a good board member or you know someone who might, please drop me an email or give me a call (604) 733-1474.

New Nominee Requirements:

• Paid member of the WAA (it's never too late to join)
• 4 years industry experience as a practitioner, consultant, vendor or educator
• Exemplifies leadership qualities by way of teaching, presenting, writing or dedicating volunteer time to the benefit of the web marketing or web analytics industries.
• Provides two industry sponsors who support this individual as a nominee.
• Provides an up to date resume that summarizes work and education history and provides authorization to edit and publish for review by members.
• Provides a 3 to 4 paragraph profile and picture/mug shot along with authorization to edit and post to WAA website should they be selected as a nominee.
• Provides a letter describing why they should be nominated to the board
• Is able to commit 15 to 20 hours per month to activities related to their role on the board.
  

Blogging for dollars or pay per post is a relatively new and growing area within blogging and internet marketing.

The concept is reasonably simple; you offer to pay a blogger to create a post on their blog about you, your product or your service. This post could be a review, a comment or simply a rambling post about anything you ask them to post about.

The benefits of having others blog about your product or service can be significant. When others blog about your site it will help improve your network of back links (this will help you achieve better SEO rankings), it can directly refer traffic to your site, it can impact your brand awareness, and it can provide you with valuable feedback regarding your offerings.

So far there are a few companies that have caught my attention in this space. http://payperpost.com http://www.reviewme.com http://sponsoredreviews.com I'm sure there are more, and there will be more soon, as this appears to be a growing business opportunity.

payperpost.com already boast clients such as HP and ZDNet.

So the interesting question that comes to mind now is: How valuable or trust worthy will blogs be in the future as a source of impartial information if people are being paid to write them?

I don't know how I feel about it. I think it is a great opportunity for marketers to help promote their business as it can help you in so many different ways. I'm not sure how it will impact the blog community and the general surfer who still doesn't really understand what a blog is. Blog purists will like not like the idea at all. People who are just being introduced to blogs might come to the conclusion that all blogs are just for marketing purposes and not trust them.

As I said the jury is still out for me.

What do you think?

I am happy to announce that I have been selected as one of the 37 people nominated for the SEMPO board of directors. If elected I look forward to working with some of the best minds inside the SEO community. It will be a big challenge and it will take a significant amount of my time, but I believe that I have a lot to offer the membership and I look forward to meeting more of our industries major contributors, it will be a lot of fun and a very rewarding experience.

If you want to vote you can visit the SEMPO website between February 6-16. The elected directors will be announced at the end of February. The new board will begin meeting in March.

Posted by Darcy Foster - Nominee for the SEMPO board of directors

Internet marketing is a very broad subject. In my opinion at its simplest level it is about: -campaigns that drive visitors to your web site -how well your web site does in terms of conversions & user experience -your ability to measure & analyses your performance so that you can improve both your campaigns and your web site

To date many consultants and service providers focus on one particular aspect of internet marketing. Either driving traffic, or improving conversion rates, or helping you measure and track visitors to your web site or blog. To effectively manage the internet marketing of your web site I believe that one needs to take a more holistic and iterative approach. This is not a simple task; it requires a host of skill sets and tools.

One need would need to have analytics set up on their site (like www.omniture.com) so that they can measure and analyses the current performance of their website and campaigns. Then you will need to have someone who can review the data to determine the ROI that is being achieved by your marketing efforts, the conversion rates of your different success events and where you are losing visitors.

This analyst should have knowledge of marketing and usability, or be a part of a multi functional team who can come up with alternatives to try and improve the current marketing efforts and the user experience of the site.

These strategies will then be handed off to a design and development team or provide to the agency who implements the campaigns or manages the site.

To properly measure the impact of the changes you should take advantage of multivariate or A/B testing so that you can clearly identify the impact of the changes that you have made.

Then the process starts all over again with review the results...

This is an area that I am currently working on. I'm trying to tie together our current service offerings into one holistic internet marketing service. It will take me some time to solidify how we will offer the service, how we will position it... but it is an area that I see huge potential for people to see measured improvements and know what is happening with the money they are spending.

May people feel that blogs are just web sites that individuals have to stay in touch with family and friends or to complain about stuff. Blogs can and should be much more than that. From a corporate stand point they should be a place to add a human element to what otherwise could be perceived as a faceless machine that doesn't care about its customers and only cares about money.

Small, medium, and large corporations are filled with real people, and many of them are very happy to be working where they are and love their companies product or service. Many of these same people love to interact with others and tell them how great it is to work where they do... Many of these people aren't in the sales and marketing group and without a blog would never have there voice heard.

Blogging is also a very powerful communication tool for executives who can keep employees and customers up to date with what is going on inside the company in real time. They can even get into real time dialogs with people via comments that get posted to their submissions.

Customers are people, not numbers and as a result they want to interact with the corporations that they do business with. They want to know that the companies care about them and how their product or service is perceived.

So blogging can be an effective, inexpensive way for companies of all sizes to humanize their presence and stay in direct contact with their stakeholders. An additional benefit that also comes from it can be a benefit to your search engine rankings.

Search engines love fresh relevant content, and if you are writing a blog about the aspects of your job or work that your are passionate about then you will no doubt be creating content that users want to read, and that search engines will value.

Blogging isn't necessarily easy, and isn't for everyone. May people just aren't writers, and others just can't seem to find the time (it can take a lot of time). So companies are afraid of letting their employees blog as they are worried about their brand, confidential information... and their legal departments get up in arms. The reality is that these same people/employees that the legal department is worried about already have the tools at their disposal without a blog to damage the firms that they are working for and yet most of them don't.

So what is the bottom line? Blogging can be a very effective way to inexpensively promote (including the SEO benefits), humanize, and interact with your customers/employees, so if you can you should Blog.

More and more people are asking themselves questions about the performance of their websites.

What kind of performance should I expect from our website?

What is a good conversion rate?

What is an average conversion rate?

What is my current conversion rate?

Let us start by defining what a conversion rate is, as different people may measure it in different ways.

A conversion rate is the ratio of the number of successful events divided by the number of visits or visitors (this is the first place that people may get different numbers).

Different business may want to define the denominator of this equation in different ways. They may feel that for their business it is most important to measure conversions based on only how many unique people visit their site verses how many visits are made to the site. My feeling on this is that it should be measured by visits, as there is no way to be sure if someone is a unique visitor. It could be a different person using the same computer at a different time, or the same person visiting your web site from a different computer later. Regardless of how you choose to define your denominator make sure that you are consistent in its application otherwise you won't be able to compare the numbers over time.

The numerator of the equation will also have a large impact on your conversion rate. Depending on what you success event is will impact what a good, average or poor conversion rate would be for your web site. If your success event was someone signing up to get a free MP3 player with no strings attached you would expect that your conversion rate would be 70% or more. On the other hand if your conversion rate was selling a $100,000 car online and having someone pay for it with their credit card you would probably expect your conversion rate to be well under 1%.

For years now people have been talking about the average conversion rate being ~2%. Comparing your conversion rate to the average conversion rate isn't all that useful. You need to compare apples to apples. You need to compare against other web sites that are in the same competing space that you are.

Here are some examples of different verticals conversion rates.

Lead generation 10-70% Catalog company 5-10% Specialty stores 3-5% Fashion/Clothing 2-2.5% Travel 2-2.5% Home/Furnishing 1.5-2% Sports/Outdoors 1.25-1.75% Electronics 1-1.5% All industries 2-3%

The first step to improving your conversion rate is to start tracking it. Then you will be able to measure positive or negative impacts that result from changes that you have made to your web site or to your marketing campaigns. Next don't strive to be average, strive to be the best that you can inside your industry, and never be satisfied with the status quo. Managing and optimizing a web site is an ongoing process that is never completed. You must continue to measure, analysis, strategize, design, implement and test new ideas.