It’s 2007, so it’s out with the OLD and in with the NEW.
What’s old, in terms of SEO? Obsessively watching indexation numbers and rankings on “trophy” keywords (like the one you know the CEO always checks first thing in the morning). Worrying yourself sick over “duplicate content penalties”. Relying on Sitemaps XML files to fix your indexation problems (news flash: your rankings will still suck!). Exchanging links.
What’s “in” in SEO for 2007? Truly understanding and leveraging the power of Long Tail dynamics. Becoming a trusted contributor within Wikipedia, Digg, StumbleUpon, Netscape, Reddit. Building your network in MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, Bebo, MyBlogRoll, and the blogosphere in general and then reaping the rewards of “network effects.” Building custom search engines and rallying your community to help improve it. Link baiting.
So how the heck do you measure the impact of this sort of stuff?
These new paradigms call for some new KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Addressing Long Tail SEO specifically, we at Netconcepts came up with the following KPIs (props to my colleague Brian Klais for coming up with a lot of this!):
- Brand-to-Nonbrand Mix
- Unique Pages
- Pages Yielding Traffic
- Keywords per Page Yield
- Visitor per Keyword Yield
- Index-to-Crawl Ratios
- Engine Yield
For definitions and explanations of these seven new metrics, have a read of Brian’s article Beneath the Surface of Search, hot off the presses at Multichannel Merchant.