If any of these issues applies to your website it is probably wise to start thinking about Conversion optimization. Where SEO, SEA and Bannering are all offsite channels, Conversion optimization is purely to increase the conversion Onsite. By increasing your Onsite conversion rate, you will get more from conversions from your website.

Conversion optimization, what is it?

Conversion optimization (CO) is the trajectory that will be entered to improve the conversion rate of a website. It should be noted that conversion optimization is not the same as usability, where the main focus is on improving the user experience. CO looks at which pages show possibility of improvement, then tests alternate pages using a tool like for example Google Website Optimizer. This allows both A/B (two different pages) and multivariate tests (multiple variants within a page) to perform. After the final test phase there will be determined which pages actually have performed better. The final goal in mind is to raise the conversion rate, by so allowing more site visitors to turn into real buyers/leads.

How does Conversion optimization works?

After having determined to start a conversion trajectory, there will be a number of steps that have to be taken to achieve a final result.

• Persona Creation: What does a number of average users of the website looks like, what are their needs and how are they developed in their internet skills?
• Analyze bottlenecks using Webanalytics: Here the goal funnel (ordering process) will analyze the content of the pages, what pages are popular, important pages for the purpose funnel, pages with high bounce rates, etc.
• Personas and Expert Opinions: By using the personas and expert opinions alternative pages for A / B testing and Multivariate testing will be determined.
• Testing Website Optimizer: By using the Website Optimizer the test will be prepared, the script will be placed and the different landing pages will be used.
• Analyze Results: Over time, the Website Optimizer will pick a winner based on statistical significance.
• Implementation winner and testing: Once the page is determined that it has the best performance, it can be implemented and further tested using a multivariate test. Moreover, the choice can be made for a new process in which another part is optimized.

Case Mens & Relatie

Mens & Relatie is an online dating service that brings singles together. The goal is to convert more visitors into actual leads. To achieve this, the Website Optimizer was used which measured both multivariate test as an A/B test with three variants.

A/B/C Test
The A/B/C test has the same approach, to see which side the boxes would generate most conversions. There was also investigated whether a bold text works better than a text which is not bold printed.

The three variants and the original were as follows:

• Original: Boxes right + normal text
• Combination 2-3 Boxes right + bold text
• Combination 3-4 Boxes left + normal text
• Combination 1-2 Boxes left + bold text

The final results showed that in particular the bold text largely improved the conversion rate. Moving the box to the left had some impact but not so much as making the text bold.

De final results show that the bold text in particular largely improved the conversion rate. Moving the box to the left had some impact but not so much as making the text bold.

Multivariate test

It started with a multivariate test on the homepage. Here are two variations for each box created. This gives a total of eight combinations plus the original. The difference with the original text is that the new texts are more similar to the Adwords ads. Important is that your Offsite marketing activities match your Onsite statements, in this case there was a match between a clear call to action text in both boxes and in Adwords.

Eventually combination one proved to be the winner, which was a text that was used in box one in combination with the original text of box two. This was a quite recognizable statistical significance in the fact that the variation would beat the original but not all the other variants. The goal was to improve the conversion rate, and therefore combination one has to be implemented. The results show what the impact can be on the conversion ratio with just a simple test.

For Mens & Relatie the final testing ensured a substantial increase in conversion rate on the site. A single conversion optimization trajectory made clear that they were structurally assured of a higher conversion rate and therefore more leads.

Why invest in Conversion Optimization?

Conversion Optimization is an ideal way to improve the conversion rate on your website. A one-time investment are quickly earned back and the gains are permanent. Even better is to keep testing and fine-tuning in order to achieve an optimal conversion rate which will earn in the long run. Google Website Optimizer can therefore be an ideal tool to improve this in a significant way.

What also must be taken into consideration is that the results do no only improve the website, but benefit all the offsite channels, as the conversion rate on the website increases. This will decrease the CPA within the SEA campaigns due to a higher conversion rate. Result is that besides the initial increase in conversion with SEA there is a further increase in volume terms from SEA conversions. It can be achieved by creating multiple keywords to start advertising. In addition, an investment in SEO now might be interesting since the conversion rate has improved and the changes to your website now can be recouped. In short all channels will benefit with a conversion trajectory.

Conversion Optimization: Must Have For Onsite & Offsite Conversion Improvement is a post from: Onetomarket

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This year, on the first day of the event Martijn Beijk gave a presentation about the relationship with another client of Onetomarket; Conrad Electronic. He explained the successful implementation  of conversion optimization for shop.conrad.nl

There were several interesting speakers who spoke that day, but in this blog I will only post about the presentation of Mike Moran (Chief Strategist, Converseon), Simon Sundén (Digital Director, Honesty) and Martijn Beijk (SEO & Web-analystics consultant, Onetomarket).

On the second day of the event Theo Lentjes (Marketing Manager, Onetomarket) gave a presentation about Conversion optimization,  important matters like ‘what are the bottlenecks’ and ‘how can you convince visitors and convert them into taking action’ were discussed during this presentation. At the end of this post you can read more about this presentation.

Why white hat SEO is ‘the way’ for you

Mike Moran spoke during his presentation about why white hat SEO is ‘the way to go’.

SEO should be about the long term influence and the long term benefits for the client. By terms as pagerank sculpting and the upcoming social media he explained his assumption.

Google has changed his algorithm several times the past years, and the will not stop changing.

Every technical update will eventually get old and be replaced by the newest update, a process that goes on and on and on.

That is why he explained the term pagerank sculpting. In the early days of Google Pagerank sculpting was a common used technic to create excellent page rankings.  Today Pagerank sculpting doesn’t work anymore, because Google changed the page rank values. One of the things that are becoming more and more important is social media. Moran showed an example in the US were he created a query which generated only Universal and paid search results on the whole page. In other terms; there was no ‘normal’ website indicated on the first page of the Google results. What means a major change for SEO. Eventually this will lead to a triangular relationship between search, Google and you.

Moran thinks you should follow a strategy based on SEO tactics which will have benefits for everyone within the triangular relationship.

Social Media Marketing – Killer Tactics

Simon Sundén gave many tips and tricks for Social Media Marketing during his presentation. He presented the most important ones in a top 10 list:

10 Things you should do in Social Media Marketing.

1. Start a blog!
2. Optimize and ping it.
3. Link out like madness.
4. Set up a Facebook page.
5. Monitor Search words
6. Make sure you get a Facebook like button.
7. Twingly blog links. You will love it.
8. Let your ‘Social Media Naturals’ do the job.
9. React and discuss with others.
10. Change your blog in a natural social blog.

It was an interesting presentation with a lot of Swedish social media elements, though useful in many countries.

Conversion optimization: Conrad Electronic

The relationship between client and consultancy firm and how to accomplish goals was the main subject of the presentation. The use of SEO and Conversion optimization were explained. You can find the presentation via the link below.

PPC Blackhat and how to protect your campaigns against them

The subject of this presentation is Blackhat PPC. The presentation was not about showing how to trick Google, but to think as a so called ‘blackhat’ and be able to detect them. For instance; it is difficult to understand ‘ad hijackers’ without knowing how they work, or without understanding how to eliminate them. Affiliates who are generating traffic via Adwords, will cost you your traffic. The merchant pays a compensation for every sale of the affiliate. If an advertising of a brand leads to a sale for the affilate because of the name and reputation of the brand, the merchant pays for traffic that already saw the advertisement.

Sometimes the law approves certain matters, but Google doesn’t and vice versa. Mikkel deMib, a former blackhat explains that a couple of years ago he recognized that his actions caused serious problems for the ‘SEM world’ and for the people acting in this world. Mikkel deMib didn’t want to be the reason for these problems.

Conversion Optimization – Visitors, barriers & persuasion

Conversion Optimization is not about doing some tricks, but more about analyzing your costumers. Who are they, what moves them, and how can I help them to easily make a conversion on my website? How can you convince them and what is the best location to start testing. During the presentation all of these aspects were discussed.

Search Marketing Expo Stockholm is a post from: Onetomarket

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To test this, we took a domain with no history (never registered, no backlinks) and made a page with 250 links on it. Those links refer to pages with also 250 on it (and so on…). The linktext and URL’s were numbered from 1 till 250, In the same order as they appeared in the source code. We submitted the URL via “addurl” and waited.

On the first visit of Googlebot it only visited the root page (http://example.com/). After a few hours it returned and visited all the 250 pages it found on the root page. At first it seemed that Google was dividing all the links on the pages into three blocks:

• Block1: links 1 till 9
• Block2: links 10 till 99
• Block3: links 100 till 250

If Googlebot visits a page there is a good chance that it will follow links from one or more of the blocks. The links are crawled in a batch per block in a random order. The chances that block 1 is crawled is three times greater then block 2 and even 6 times greater then block 3. In block 3 there are two links which have a slightly higher chance to be crawled: link /100/ and /200/.

With only the results of this test it is to early to conclude that Google always divides a page into these blocks. It is possible that Google bases its blocks on the length of the link text, on the length of a URL, on the position of the link etcetera. To exclude al the other possibilities we have set up some other tests.

The test which gave us the decisive answer was a test with the length of URL’s in random order on a page. Those links linked to similar pages with also links with various lengths in random order (etcetera). Googlebot seems to crawl links in order of length. A good thing to know if you want to do some advanced site structure sculpting.

Takeaways

With these insights choosing the length of your URL’s becomes more important. It is a good way to influence Googlebot so you should choose the length of each URL wisely. Google crawls short URL’s before it crawls the longer URL’s. It doesn’t help to make all your URL’s short. If they all have an equal length they will get crawled at random. Always consider the need for indexation and the need to be crawled if you choose your URL.

So it’s good to take it into account when you are designing your site structure. Probably it is even more important for linkbuilding. We have not tested it yet, but there is a good chance Google crawls external links the same way. This would mean that if your URL is on a page with hundreds of other links, you may increase your crawl chance if you have the shortest URL.

note: This insight is part of a thesis, more to come soon. (link will be placed here.)

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SEO ranking factors 2010, a.o. presented by Rand Fishkin SEOmoz

Recently a patent has been granted to Google about the reasonable surfer model. Rand Fishkin explained this patent and what it meant for SEO. This session was also about the correlation between titles, headings and alt attributes within a website based on facts done by research of SEOmoz.

Linkbuilding outside of the box

This session was about linkbuilding. A lot of interesting tools were mentioned including Majestic SEO, TagCrowd and the recently launched InfluenceFinder. We have found the session about ‘how to get links from university and government websites’ particularly interesting – creative ways to get real valuable authoritative links.

Top Ten Customized Search Analytics reports

Most important thing about this session is that Web Analytics does not exist of just generating reports. It is much more than this and requires the right interpretation of the data. Good reports are necessary for interpretation and analysis of the data and some examples were shown during this session.
Important part of this track was the Visitor Journey of Customer Journey. Tracking First click visits and beyond. Something also in coherence with conversion attribution

Will Critchlow (Distilled Ltd.) his presentation is available on scribd.

The Art of Measuring Local & Mobile Search results.

Martijn Beijk, SEO Consultant and Local Search specialist at Onetomarket was a speaker at SMX Advanced London in the session ‘The Art of Measuring Local & Mobile Search Results’ together with Mike Belasco (seOverflow) and Christine Churchill (Keyrelevance).
This session was about gaining insight and visibility into both online and offline conversions from local and mobile search results. Apart from the implementation of analytics on results from Google Places the presentation of Martijn Beijk also mentioned ways to gain more insight in offline sales by using in-store surveys, coupons, etc. Important part of the presentation was an attribution model. One that could fit ‘Latent Offline Conversions’. The visitor that is orientating on your website but might be buying the product offline, in your store. Attached you will find Martijn’s Presentation with some take aways.

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Chapters
The book contains the following chapters:

• What is Search Engine Optimization?
• Defining Keywords and Search Phrases.
• Sitestructure
• Content
• HTML, CSS and JavaScript
• Server Side
• Linkbuilding
• Linkbuilding Techniques
• Webanalytics
• Blended search (Universal Search)
• SEO in the (online) marketingmix

Ordering the book

You can order the book, also internationally, via Amazon.co.uk or Bol.com (dutch)

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Martijn Beijk and Jaap Dijkstra, Business Developer with Boat Company Lovers, will present their business case on Local Search. They will explain how to set up a successful local search campaign.

Martijn Beijk is an SEO consultant at Onetomarket and advices about Search Engine Optimisation. Martijn advises international clients like Royal Dutch Airlines, Conrad Electronic, Deutsche Telekom and FC Barcelona. He is one of the 27 participants in the Local Search Ranking Factors.

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Last year, in April, the Onetomarket Crew was at SMX Munich where they met Jens and Andreas.

Both work at T-Online, one of the biggest webportals in Germany. Jens also runs the blog Inhouse-SEO.de.

T-Online uses the Google Custom Search for its own search engine on the webportal. The team from T-Online have developed a keyword tool that is linked to the search queries. This way they are able to analyze all the search queries and clickthroughs from these searches. By doing this they are able to discover and monitor evolving trends. This very useful data can be used to optimize websites or various campaigns

In 2008 the total market share of search for T-online was estimated at 2.1%. This is quite a piece of marketshare when you take a look at the search market in Germany.
But in the end, because the portal uses the Google Custom Search, the 2,1% will be accounted to Google.

Now we can bring you the full interview with Jens and Andreas about the keyword tool!

Full-length English version: Interview Keywordtool with T-Online

Full-length German version: Interview Keywordtool mit T-Online

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• it takes time to become an authority
• it takes time to do link building for a large set of keywords
• it takes time before Yahoo! Will give us the appropriate information we need
• it takes time before a link is paying off
• it takes time to write good content that is link bait worthy
• it takes time to build a good network
• it takes time to do everything…manually

It takes time to become an authority

When we take a look at the real deal we see that big authorities find it more easy to earn links than sites that are less known. Authorities are more likely to be mentioned when someone has to pick a name in a specific segment. For example; when someone wants to name a bookstore they are more likely to mention Barnes & Noble, Amazon, etc instead of the corner shop running a website.

Authorities also have the advantage to have a good network of followers. An authority posting a research on a specific topic is taken more seriously than a smaller competitor who would have published the same research. These authorities also find it easier to get regional or even global press, often resulting in a link building snowball.

Authority websites usually generate more traffic. The appealing content will be noticed by more people and thus receiving a good inbound link will be more likely to happen. This is something I noticed when I wrote some articles on B2B SEO. The posts that were published as guest posts on authority blogs like Yoast.com received a lot of inbound links, while the one published on Netters (in Dutch) only received a few. Relatively speaking the number of inbound links compared to traffic are the same but the net result is a lot higher on authority blogs.

It takes time to do link building for a large set of keywords

A good link to your website will increase the rankings on all your keywords because your domain is becoming stronger. However in a competitive market you won’t get stunning results with just a few extra links. We all know that good deep links with the right anchor text can really benefit your rankings on your top keywords. I estimate that a website needs about 8 focus keywords (of course this depends per site). This means you will have to do link building for all those 8 keywords phrases.

Branded links

One way to achieve good branding results is to use your business title in anchor texts. You can use a wide variation of keyword combinations including your business title. An example for Onetomarket would be that instead of just using `Onetomarket` as the anchor text it would be wise to use `Onetomarket online marketing`.

Do not ask for links, write your own articles and submit them!

A different way to achieve good quality links with the right anchor text is to write your own articles and submit these to informative websites, blogs, or online magazines in your area of expertise. Most of the times you are allowed to use your own links! Be sure to check in advance if the website that is willing to publish your article is using `nofollow` links. If appropriate you can also use press releases in the same way, but often these don’t include links.

Keyword focused link building always takes time

When you are focusing on 8 keywords and you need about 5 links each, you’ll have to find a numerous amount of websites to help you with your link building. It is important to use every available opportunity (of good quality!). That’s why it is important to invest in your relationships with website owners or PR contacts. Make a phone call instead of resending that email if you feel you are being ignored.

Some articles worth reading on this subject are:

Getting the anchor text you want and Using KW research to diversify link profiles

It takes time before Yahoo! Will give us the appropriate information we need

Yahoo! Isn’t always that fast with indexing new links. It could take weeks before Yahoo! Will show those inbounds links, and in some unfortunate cases, never – while they are there. A good way to check is to see if Yahoo! has indexed the specific page.
As this is slowing down the monitoring of your link building it is wise to use different tools as well. Tools to use for example are Mint to see what new link is providing you new traffic. Another tool you can’t miss of course is the Google Webmaster Central.

Yahoo! and 301′s

Aside, Yahoo has the nasty habit to count 301 redirects as backlinks. I’m wondering if Yahoo will ever recognize a 301 as a 301. It surely will take some time before we will see this happen and the garbage being cleaned out of the results.

It takes time before a link is paying off

It is a known fact that old websites with old links rank easily. According to Google this old domain has earned its stripes and thus deserving a higher ranking. It is not just domain age that counts, also the period the old links already exist. Domains that have been parked for years haven’t increased in value a lot over time.

Unfortunately, ‘getting old’ takes a lot of time. Two years is not old. However a website dating back from the nineties with some good links can rank top 10 with little text on the most competitive keywords. Can’t wait that long? Buy a whole website!

Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine does not seem to be updated or rarely as of February 2008. This means that new domains have age background according to tools that use the Internet archive as their source of information. Note that it is possible that information is being updated, but is only available to some people.

It takes time to write good content that is link bait worthy

I’ve got a strong feeling that link bait nowadays is the magic word for everything and everyone that needs a bit of link building.
Its true, link bait is offering good opportunities to get you a few nice links, but make sure your content stands out of the crowd.
Some background information:

gathering link bait (in Dutch)

differences between link bait and link building (also in Dutch).

The same counts for link bait as mentioned before; if you reach the authority websites first, your project is much likely to succeed.

Cloning behaviour

Lists are always good. But everyone knows that. The Internet is flooded with lists on top 10s, 20s, 30s, 101s. Some are of high quality. Many of them are the result of poorly copy/paste behaviour.

But what makes it attractive to link to such a list? With each new version the list just has to be more complete!

Work half done right. The One Million Dollar Homepage was a good idea and worth linking to (43000 inbound links). But clones of this idea like The Most Expensive Domainname in the World aren’t worth more than a nofollow link.

SO what is good link bait??

Good link bait derives from your Unique Selling Points. Do you have the credibility to bring thorough research? Do so! Are you known as an informal, spontaneous club of people? Cover some gossip! Are you quick, fast and a real sponge? Earn those scoops and benefit from the momentum!

It takes time to build a good network

By building a network I don’t mean building a good linknetwork. Invest in useful contacts and bond with them so you’ll have a good audience who are more likely to spread the word or happily offer their help to reach your set of goals. Sometimes its plainly simple.

1. a woman is more likely to share.
2. someone who is leaving happy or funny comments are more likely to share than people who are just ‘consuming’
3. someone who sends presents now and then is more likely to share than someone that is `just being nice`.

Identify top decision makers in your segment

Invest in site owner relationships for your segment. Take a look at the top 50 of your most important keywords and interact. Give them some food for thought or even real food and invite them for dinner! You’ll soon notice that getting those links will be a lot more easier for you.

Wiep has a nice tip about this on his blog:

Set up a campaign in Google AdWords’ content network, to determine which (relevant) websites generate traffic and conversions. Contact those websites directly and try to get a link.

Authority, authority, authority

If your brand is well known it will be more easy to get things done. Make sure your brand is part of your link building as this will help you in the future.

It takes time to do everything…manually

Lot of the things that have to be done manually take time, lots of time. Keyword reviews, identifying good ranking websites. Analysing and building profiles of competitors, etc. But also engaging in link building. Spreading press releases, optimizing link profiles, cleaning out paid links and things as such.

Another thing that will take a lot of time is changing an organization. Once engaged in link building they will need to ‘think’ link building. Making it clear that this is important with all players involved takes time and lots of patience.

7 reasons why link building needs patience is a post from: Onetomarket

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The target group of the book are marketers with a basic knowledge of on line. Therefore, we also give information about the role of SEO within the on line marketing mix. A technical person also finds very interesting stuff within the book, especially in the chapters about client side and server side coding.

The content of the book is divided into twelve chapters:

1. What is SEO?
2. How do people use search engines?
3. Determining keywords
4. Sitestructures
5. Content
6. Client side
7. Server side
8. Link building
9. Link building techniques
10. Web analytics
11. Selecting an SEO partner
12. SEO within the (on line) marketing mix

The book is available under ISBN number 9789059403680 and consists of 224 pages. We’re very proud of it and we’ll keep you posted with info about the English version.

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The full overview in 7 steps:

1. Optimize the existing error pages
2. Improve internal links
3. Improve external links
4. NEVER remove pages from your site, but archive them
5. Redirect some common misspellings
6. Monitor error pages
7. Monitor search queries

Plus two bonus tips:

1. commercialization of the 404-page
2. keep your content up-to-date

The road map, Part 1: optimize existing error pages

Step 1: optimize existing error pages
On the web many articles can be found which explain how an error page can be made as user friendly as possible to decrease the percentage of visitors who leave your site without viewing more pages. The general view is that a 404-page must be user-friendly and that you should help visitors as good as possible by finding what they sought for. Place a few popular links or a search field on the error page. The other recommendations have already been extensively discussed at various sites, so I give merely a few links:

Additional information:

• General information can be found on Wikipedia and Evolt.org. More technical information can be found on the web designers magazine A List Apart.

Step 2: improve internal links
Prevention is better than cure. Try to avoid visitors to stream at the 404-page as much as possible, how good this page may be. A comprehensive scan shows if all links within your site (both internal and ‘outgoing’ links) are still functioning properly. The free program Xenu Link Sleuth is an excellent tool, but there are obviously more tools that do the same. The inventory of your internal links can be done automatically, but the corrections are mostly done by hand.

Additional information:

• The tool Xenu Link Sleuth. A simple Google query provides enough other tools;

Step 2.1: adding favicon.ico
This part actually belongs in step 2, but I thought it was important enough to mention it separately. Internet Explorer asks for the so-called ‘favicon.ico’ file at each Web page with a browser view. This is the small icon on the left side of the address bar of a Web browser, you must have seen it sometimes. If there is no file called ‘favicon.ico’ in the root of your website (http://www.yourwebsite.com/favicon.ico) it won’t be found and Internet Explorer generates an error message. You can easily prevented this common error by placing a favicon on your site.

Additional information:

• Technical and substantive “how-to” for dealing with favicons: http://www.trilithium.com/johan/2005/02/no-favicon/

Step 3: improving external / incoming links
Once if the internal link structure is okay, the next step is to improve the links from other sites to your site. These are the so-called inbound links or links. The inventory could also be automated, for example, with the free program back link analyzer, with the Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools. The correction of incoming links is possibly more labor intensive, because you are relying on third parties. However it is worthwhile to take action on this part.
Tip: If you’re improving your external links, make sure the incoming links contain decent descriptive texts with keywords (for example: “web design and seo weblog” instead of “weblog” as link text) .

Additional information:

1. An excellent tool unfortunately with limited export opportunities is Back link analyzer;
2. Yahoo! Site Explorer: gives accurate information about incoming links;
3. Google Webmaster Tools gives an overview of all incoming links for a website. These data are not available for third parties, so you should set the webmaster tools environment with a Google account (is a winner anyway).

Step 4: NEVER remove pages, but archive them
On the news section of your site is an article from 2006. When it was placed, there was pretty much coverage by the media and the article was linked by several blogs that discussed the content in detail. But anno 2008 the news is not relevant anymore. Whatever you do, do not delete the article! The article is a while on your site already, it is included in the index of Google and Yahoo and has perhaps built up some pagerank/relevance/history. It would be an eternal shame to throw that away. So, keep it! Put it in an archive; if necessary, put an additional comment on this article that the news might be outdated and comes from the archive. This also prevents errors when people have followed the old link.

Additional information:

• Cool URIs don’t change: http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

Part 2: installation of extra usability

Step 5: redirect some common misspellings
Are certain misspellings often made on your website? Is the word ‘contat’ tapped in by many visitors when the search for your ‘contact’ page? This is a random example, but you know what I mention. If this occurs frequently, you can redirect visitors automatically (with a so-called ’301 redirect ‘) to the proper ‘contact’ page. You can find a clear overview of the different 301-techniques on the Onetomarket site.
Please note: build in an additional warning for those who have landed on the page by using a ‘misspelling’. Show a message like: ‘We have automatically redirected you to this page, while you searched for the page ‘mispelings.html’. Make sure if you want to bookmark or link this page, that you use the correct address. Or something similar to this effect.

Part 3. Aftercare: monitoring

Step 6: Monitor error pages

To have access to the amount of visitors which comes into contact with error messages on your site, you must use your statistics package.
With the free Google Analytics package, you must set a little by your self. For example, are certain misspellings made (see step 5) and which websites provide false links that causes’ bounces’. This information could also be provided through Google webmaster tools, which shows so called “crawl errors’. WordPress users can use log-404. This WordPress plugin logs error messages and makes a network overview of the last 100.

Additional information:

• Tracking 404 pages in Google Analytics;
• Debug using Google Webmaster Tools;
• And a WordPress plugin that effectively logs error pages.

Step 7: Monitor search queries
Another aspect that can be monitored, concerns the so-called referrers. Most statistical packages would not only provide information about which site provides you visitors, but also, as they came through Google, which keywords they had used in Google when they found your site. Google Analytics works in this context with ‘keyword considerations (‘All reports > ‘Marketing Optimization’> ‘Keyword considerations ‘).
These ‘considerations’ are nothing more than suggestions for keywords that you could use in your site. People were looking for these and thought that they would find them on your site. Why not give them what they want? At least, as long as it’s relevant.
We are not very satisfied with the operation of this feature of Analytics, but because anyone can use Analytics for free, we mentioned it here. Other, but from better quality and also more specialised are the following tools: HitTail, 103Bees and the Search Meter WordPress plugin.

Additional information:

• Wikipedia on referers;
• Search Meter WordPress Plugin. Keyword suggestions from the WordPress interface;
• HitTail: http://www.hittail.com/
• 103Bees: http://www.103bees.com/

Part 4. Bonus tip: 404-pages as part of the sales process

1: commercialization of the 404-page
In some cases, an error page can be used to encourage the sales on the site rather than merely provide navigation to continue to search the site.

A good example is the 404-page of Apple. At first glance, there is a ‘normal’ 404-page, there is a slightly accusing text which says that I as a visitor might have typed in something wrong (there is some improvement needed) and there are links that leads a visitor deeper in to the site.

The most striking part of that page is a trio of images of approximately 175 by 150 pixels with information about certain offers, promotions or new products. So called banners, and they rotate. For example press several times on F5 (Ctrl-R for Safari) and you will see that each time a different banner will be shown on the page. That is a very clever action from Apple. On the 404-page are teasers that are popular. Apple makes a virtue of necessity and this principle can be applied to all kinds of sites!

Additional information:

• Apple error page: http://www.apple.com/error.html

Tip 2: keep the content up-to-date
Suppose your company site is growing and there will be new jobs at your site. For some functions you are looking for new people continuously, while others already have been filled in. It is also possible that certain functions are fulfilled now, but they will be brought back on the site in the future.
In all cases, you are better off not to remove the vacancy pages, even though the functions are already fulfilled.
In the first place the pages build up a history in search engines, in links from job sites, perhaps even on the personal weblog of someone who has responded.
Secondly, it is a cold trick to add an additional piece of text on the vacancy page in question: “at this moment this vacancy is fulfilled, but there is always place for enthusiastic, talented hard workers” or something similar. That is a lot better than ’404 Not found’….

Preventing 404s in 7 steps is a post from: Onetomarket

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