How to evaluate SEO Success

Correctly measuring the achievement of an SEO campaign can vary greatly depending on the type of business you're in and your objectives.

However, there are three key performance indicators (KPIs) that should always be considered when measuring an SEO campaign's efficiency:

•    Rankings

•    Traffic

•    Conversions

Not only can the information gathered from these three KPIs enable you to exactly measure your campaign's performance, they can also provide you with actionable data to improve your campaign over time.

Rankings

Keyword rankings are the most familiar and obvious KPI, particularly when studies show that websites listed on the first page of Google receive up to 92 percent of traffic share. Tracking keyword rankings over time gives you the ability to craft your SEO policy around the keywords that require the most attention and provide the most benefit.

For example, let's say you're tracking 20 keywords, and all but five of these are on the first page of Google. You know that in order to get these five keywords on the first page, you will have to invest more optimization hard work into them.

On the other hand, you may find out that these keywords are simply too aggressive, and based on your research, would not provide enough benefit to warrant the attempt. It would be more useful to focus efforts on the other 15 keywords in order to get them into the top three positions, where they'll really pay off. Without keyword ranking data, making informed strategic decisions such as this would be very difficult.

While keeping track of rankings is a  key, it isn't sufficient. You must also understand how these keywords translate into increased quality traffic.

Traffic

Measuring the volume and quality of traffic that first page rankings deliver is necessary. First page rankings are useless if they don't deliver enough of the right kind of traffic.

Traffic level

Traffic volume should be measured based on the number of visits that come from organic search. With a successful SEO strategy, you should see a significant increase in organic search traffic over time.

How much traffic you should expect depends on the size of your aim audience. For example, a successful SEO movement that targets people who are looking for online business card printing nationwide will deliver significantly more organic search traffic than a successful campaign targeting people who are looking for a local dentist.

Traffic excellence

 Measuring the quality of traffic is a bit trickier as it requires more cautious analysis. Some metrics that can be used to determine the quality of traffic include:

•    Pages Per Visit

•    Average Visit Duration

•    Bounce Rate

When reviewing these metrics, if you find that the average number of pages viewed per visit is low, the average time visitors spend on the site is also low, and the site's bounce rate is high, you may have open there is either an issue with your website or with the type of traffic your keywords are delivering.

We'll focus on the latter subject, which requires sympathetic the relationship between the keywords your campaign is targeting, and the traffic they're delivering. Let's take a foreclosure defense lawyer for example whose target audience is a person that is trying to avoid foreclosure on their home, and is looking specially for a good foreclosure defense lawyer.

It may make sense to the lawyer that they should optimize for the keyword term, "avoid foreclosure." 

However, this keyword presents two issues:

•    The person probing with this keyword isn't essentially looking for a foreclosure defense lawyer. They could be researching ways to avoid foreclosure without having to hire a lawyer.

•    Even if this person is open to hiring a foreclosure defense lawyer, they are still in the research phase and are therefore open to other options as well.

Conversely, the person that searches with the keyword, "foreclosure defense lawyer" is most likely looking for exactly that, a foreclosure defense lawyer. They are also past the research phase, as they've determined that hiring a lawyer is the best way to avoid foreclosure, and are simply searching for the right one.

For these reasons, this person will be more inclined to invest time on the foreclosure protection lawyer's website, researching the lawyer's credentials, reading articles written on the lawyer's blog, and so on. There is also greater likelihood that this person will convert into a meeting and possibly a new client, which leads to the next KPI.

Conversions

Perhaps the ultimate measure of success for an SEO campaign is conversions, but how are conversions clear?

Important Conversions

Conversions should be defined based on your specific goals.

Let's say your goal is to boost leads. With this in mind, conversion tracking may include contact requests, quote requests, appointment needs, or phone calls to name a few. It's also necessary to distinguish between conversions from organic search, and conversions from other sources.

It's important to note that not all visitors are ready to buy, and neglecting to measure the actions of those visitors is a slip. These conversions can be defined as newsletter subscriptions, social shares, whitepaper downloads, and other actions visitors take that indicate they are interested in what you offer. These types of conversions also serve as a great traffic quality indicator.

With conversion tracking in place, you can take the campaign full circle by knowing which keywords are generating these conversions, and why.

Determining ROI

Having a system in place to track the financial value of conversions gives you the ability to determine the ROI of your SEO campaign.

You can take this a step further and decide your ROI based on a customer's lifetime. Only measuring a new customer's first purchase, and not taking into account future repeat purchases can result in an inaccurate depiction of the true return you are receiving on your investment.

Conclusion

Tracking these KPIs not only allows you to measure your SEO campaign's present performance, but also provides actionable data to help you make the right decisions to ensure its future achievement.

SEO Super-Signals

The overwhelming majority of sites that I audit have been hammered by either Panda, Penguin, or both. Sure, there are some sites where the drop in rankings can’t even compare to a known Panda or Penguin update. Some of those can track with quite high confidence to other updates, such as the EMD update, and some just show a steady, more time-neutral drop in rankings.

Apart from of the source, by the time I am even partway through a forensic site audit, enough patterns have emerged to inform me that weakness exists across the same common range of problems. And whatever that ranges is, the patterns that stand out consistently in regard to what’s wrong can be summed up in five words.

•     Quality
•     Uniqueness
•     Authority
•     Relevance
•     Trust

Whether it’s on-site or off, content level or code level, visibly identifiable as user experience-related or muddier as far as “is this truly a user experience issue?” — or some blend of these, it always comes down to the big five, or as I like to refer to them, “Super-Signals:” QUART
.
All SEO Super Signals

It’s important to understand that all signals count in SEO.  And when it comes to the 5 super-signals, if you come up little in any one signal, you need to recompense for that shortcoming with even more crack across the other four. If you come up short in any one too much, or fail on too many of the five, your site will inevitably suffer.

Quality: It’s not an island unto itself

Create grand content. Obtain high-quality links. Create quality user knowledge. These are the oversimplified statements most often associated with the Q in QUART. When you bake serious thinking into it, we’re talking about “match the content to your business’ purpose AND searcher intention.” Take the time essential to craft content to convey the highest level of relevance, to strengthen to the visitor that your brand is trustworthy, and you have the knowledge (authority) to provide the best solution for that sole need.

Quality here also means exclusive content – not something people can find seven thousand other places on the web. Which means something about your products or services, or something about the supporting services around those, or other authority or trust signals really do set you apart from the competition all in ways that users are naturally able to see, read and identify with.

Users, users, users

Since SEO is really communicating that your site is a brand to be trusted (even if it’s a new site with only three pages and no existing customer base), and since that is resolute at least partly by how people react to your presence, user experience really is golden for SEO.
Individuality without excellence is useless

Basic dictates you need enough content that is truly sole to a given page, and within a given section of your site, and across your entire site, to even have a chance at ranking for any given phrase. Yet we can’t end there. Within the unique content, you need to also talk quality, relevance, trust and authority. Because no matter how many sites you’ve been able to create, or your SEO source created that were pure garbage and “tricked” the search engine algorithms over the years, the days of those methods are quickly winding down.

And while you still may be able to have a fake blog where every article contains four paragraphs and you stick three relations into every article, and you have a link wheel that YOU think is good enough for link signals to a site you really care about, that crap is going to take all of three seconds where a real human will know it’s a part of crap.

Even if you THINK that’s helping you now, or if you need to pick up from Penguin or a manual link penalty, or you want to avoid a future iteration of Penguin or a future manual penalty, you need to stop playing those games. Instead, recognize the long-term value of unique content that really does bake in QART.

Influence – Either You Are the Best or You Are Not

What are you doing to express that “in this field, area, market, we are the go-to source for the most trusted quality” or in a way that conveys “these people are hacks?” Have you taken the time to make sure your blog article authors have a consistent web of multi-point presences across the Internet that reinforces the notion “this person knows what they’re talking about” or are all your articles written by “admin” and posted to “unspecified”?

Have you recognized your brand authority signals through Publisher markup, or is one author given the complete control over authority signals as if they are the entire group?

Are you taking steps required to reinforce authority through quality relevant customer relations on multiple channels online? Or are you bombarding everyone everywhere with low quality noise because “we need a presence”?

Holistic significance Wins

Nearly gone are the days of “relevance means matching keywords from page to page, link to link, site to site… today, if you want the true win, you need to do what was forever the best practice about relevance. Every angle you come up to the need to match your content with searcher intent, every signal in the multi-signal assessment of relevance on site at the content and code level, and every signal in the multi-signal evaluation of relevance from off-site points of reference needs that relevance to also meet the QUART litmus test.

Relevance applies to a web site’s purpose in regard to transactional or informational. And that needs to match significance of searcher intent along the decision making timeline. Relevance applies to topical focus grouping .And it applies to your presence in social media. Are you obtaining social profiles on “all the sites” or those aligned with where your customers / clients / prospective customers / clients are spending their time?

Faith is all about User Experience

If you’re obtaining profiles on “all the sites” because you heard it’s important for ORM, do you realize you need to build every one of those up in an secluded organic way so as to prevent “low quality” presence signals?

Have you so polluted every signal on site, at the code level and off site with keyword filling that real humans scratch their head and say WTF? Or do you go about that work understanding that on-site you need consistency of signals without crossing into obnoxious? And do you go about the off-site link anchor effort in an abusive way or in a way that reflects the random nature of the larger web ecosystem?

SEO is an ecology

In my audit work, all too often, I find situations where signals clash. They oppose each other, and often cancel out any value that would otherwise live.

Note how, all over this article, I mingle each of the five factors among the others? Note how I frequently reference “multiple signals”? That’s because it’s an ecosystem. When there is proper diversity and each individual signal is one that reflects and represents verification to all the other signals specific to any single aspect of SEO, you ensure a healthy and elastic ecology specific to your presence across the web.

If you don’t slow down the decision making process in your SEO efforts, and if you don’t then consider the interwoven nature of true SEO, you end up with a site that’s a complete mess, and an off-site attendance that just makes it worse. Then you come to me and say “help – we’re in crisis”. Yet if you just slow down, and take the time essential to realize these relationships and cross-point considerations, then apply QURTA to every decision, you’ll be light years ahead.

Guest Posts Press Releases Advertorials Can harm Rankings

Google had issued two warnings about advertorials earlier this year, as well as one Google Webmaster Help video which dealt specifically with advertorials, as well as a part video in which Google's Matt Cutts discussed upcoming SEO changes.

Not surprisingly, Google has now updated their webmaster plan to include advertorials, along with other trendy spammy linking techniques, in their Link Schemes help document.

Google Further Downplays Links

First, perhaps the most important change is the truth that Google removed the entire first paragraph from their link scheme help article which detailed how your website’s inward links influenced your search rankings.

Here is the original first paragraph from the link scheme help article, which dates back at least a year:

Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on psychiatry of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links influence your ranking. The sites that link to you can give context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and reputation.

Could this removal be indicative of something bigger? Or was it simply done to make more efficient the help article with the new changes?

It's no secret that links aren’t as a precious as they were a few years ago and SEO professionals have been adjusting their linking tactics because of it. But is this another sign that Google is falling the emphasis it places on links in the search algorithm? 

Last month, in a separate change, Google began advising webmasters that high-quality sites, not links, are the best way to improve search rankings.

Keyword-Rich

Another change has to do with heavily-optimized anchor text used in press releases and articles that are spread on other sites. This technique is seen very frequently, particularly in highly spirited markets. Google gives a pretty common example of optimized anchor text:

There are many wedding rings on the market. If you want to have a wedding, you will have to pick the best ring. You will also need to buy flowers and a wedding dress.

Google also brings up “Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links”. This has somewhat gone out of favor, particularly mass submissions to free article sites for all but very spammy churn and burn markets.

However, guest redeployment is still pretty popular, although many sites that accept guest blogging, as well as those doing the writing, have begun either using no follow, or in an optimized straight URL link.

Advertorials & Native Advertising

The final addition is advertorials. Just as Google has been stating in the recent webmaster help videos, this is now an example of unnatural links that violate the Google guidelines.

Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass PageRank.

it is nice to see Google continue to update their help documents, particularly for pages that are frequented by those webmasters to have received an unnatural linking warning from Google. However, the removal of the first paragraph will likely leave some SEO professionals thinking the change, and what exactly it means, if anything.

Duck Duck go’s crash on the SEO

With new headlines that the NSA has been profiling people online travels (the irony of saying this online isn’t lost on me), it’s very exciting to see how it has affected search engines.  As privacy concerns have arisen from the situation with PRISM, Google, Yahoo and Bing have seen a small subset of the market diverge to other search engines with stricter privacy policies.  One would wait for that the media outrage would translate to a broader shift away from the search giants.  Perhaps educating people about another search engines is just beginning though, as momentum seems to be picking up daily.

 

As more and more news stories release how Google tries to mix the unique information it keeps on every searcher into their search results, and tailor these to be more and more personal, many more people are looking for sites that keep searches totally nameless. Two such sites come to mind.  Philadelphia based DuckDuckGo.com and the European based StartPage.com both proclaim to be search engines that respect privacy. Each has around 3 million searches per day.

DuckDuckGo in particular has seen its traffic rise by 2 million searches per day in the last two weeks. The website’s isolation policy states that it will not retain any personal information such as IP address, or share a user’s search record to other sites, has generated just under 3.1 million direct searches per day from June 1 to the 17. This is compared to the 1.8 million per day for May.  The search engine tweeted: “It took 1445 days to get 1 million searches, 483 days to get 2 million searches, and then just 8 days to pass 3M searches.” The growth was detailed on DuckDuckGo’s public traffic page, which illustrates a search growth spike since the NSA story first insolvent in early June. 

So for a website to rank on DuckDuckGo, it’s best not to slab their bot.  The same “great content” advice that the other search engines suggest works here too, as DuckDuckGo seeks to answer questions directly, so having FAQ pages and other information that users may want to know about products and services will surely help.  Mentions from social sites, useful sites, and trusted sites will also help in a site’s ranking because DuckDuckGo’s rankings are a hybrid of 100’s of APIs from other websites.  Weinburg says “We basically use the ranking of the causal APIs, and then re-rank, omit, merge etc. on top of that–and the argument is that it comes out better on the other end.”  So if a site ranks well on other search engines, it will most likely rank well on DuckDuckGo too.

Two things struck me as I did the research on how to rank for DuckDuckGo.  First, the results that the search engine delivers are outstanding (when you don’t want personal or local results) and unbiased.  Second, Google and other search engines have been more and more often asked to disclose information to government agencies and lawyers. The Google transparency report shows a big increase over the last few years. Google has a lot of data about you and it must disclose this data if requested by authorities.

How to Use Google Analytics to develop Your Online Marketing operation

According to Google, this platform “not only lets you measure sales and conversions, but also gives you new insights into how visitors use your site, how they arrived on your site, and how you can keep them coming back.” With a comprehensive set of features, Analytics provides attractive much everything needed to optimize your hard work. Here are some primary features and how they can be used to pick up your marketing campaign.

SEO

Search engine optimization is becoming more and more significant, and for good reason. For many businesses, it’s their main resource of traffic. Identifying patterns and accepting which keywords are bringing in the bulk of traffic is highly helpful for getting the most from SEO hard work. From the Google Analytics dashboard, clicking Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic will provide a list of keywords in ascending to descending order in terms of how many visits they have received.

This will give you a direct look into which keywords are the top performers and which are barely bringing in any traffic. It will also display the average number of pages viewed from each keyword, average visit duration, and the bounce rate. This data is helpful because you can tell how long the average visitor is spending on your site after landing. By finding a keyword that’s bringing in a significant amount of traffic, you’ll be able to profit from on this information by creating content based around similar topics.

Another great thing about SEO is that your content will often appear in search results for queries that you never predictable. By looking through the list of keywords that visitors used to find content, it can provide insights into their logic and thought patterns, which can be used for planning your future content strategy.

Content

Another way to use Google Analytics is by using the “Content” feature to decide how many page views each piece of content is receiving. Clicking on Content > Site Content > All Pages will bring you here. This provides an overview of how much exposure a particular product, blog post, page, etc. is getting. It also shows the number of unique page views, normal time on the page, and other information. This feature is helpful because it offers concrete evidence of which content is most popular and which is receiving very little attention.

By noticing patterns on hot topics, this information can be used in your continuing hard work to better provide the audience with what they’re looking for. It can also help avoid wasting time on creating content that visitors won’t be interested in. For example, if blog posts about subject (x) are bringing in a large volume of traffic, you would probably want to create more posts about that subject. If blog posts about subject (y) are bringing in a low volume of traffic, it would probably be smart to leave that subject alone in future activities.

Bounce Rate

Paying attention to the bounce rate is significant because it’s an indicator of how much visitors are interacting with a page and how long they are staying. The higher the bounce rate means the faster people are leaving, and vice versa. Therefore, a bounce rate of 100 percent means visitors and landing and immediately leaving a page. If the bounce rate is 0 percent, it means that all visitors are interacting at least on some level.

Knowing the bounce rate is useful because it’s an pointer of how each overall visitor is responding to a piece of content. Whenever you spot a bounce rate of 90 percent or more, it shows that visitors aren’t hanging around to explore that content; this means it could probably use some improvement. On the other hand, a low bounce rate of 40 percent or less shows that visitors are interacting. Over time, bounce rate patterns should help you fine-tune your content and maximize the attention that each piece of content receives. 

Social Media

If your business is using any type of social networking site like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or Pinterest, this platform can offer key insights into each network’s performance. Clicking Traffic Sources > Social > Overview will rapidly show you how many visits each network is bringing in and the overall percentage in relation to other networks.

This is useful because it’s tangible evidence of the impact of your social media movement and shows how well or badly each network is performing. For example, if Facebook was bringing in a huge amount of traffic and Twitter was bringing in very little, you might spend more time on Twitter to drive more traffic. If a particular network continues to have poor performance, you might scrap it altogether and spend more time 

on the networks that are performing well.

Mobile Devices

Due to the rising fame of mobile devices for browsing the Internet, it’s become somewhat of a essential to provide visitors with a mobile friendly experience. Luckily, Google Analytics has the capacity to show how many visitors are arriving via desktop/laptop PCs, smartphones and tablets. This information can be found by clicking on Audience > Mobile > Overview. Once arriving on this screen, you will see how many overall visits are coming from each device, pages viewed per visit, visit duration, etc.

If you notice a substantial number of visitors accessing your site via mobile devices, it may be a good idea to invest in making your site more mobile friendly. For example, responsive web design and creating an alternate mobile version are popular options.

Businesses looking to save time and money occasionally use a plugin like UppSite to create an HTML 5 app.  You can take it one step further by clicking on “Devices” from this screen to determine the specific mobile devices that are being used. If there is a comparatively equal balance of tablets and smartphones, responsive web design is probably your best option because content can be viewed on nearly any device regardless of the screen size.  

In-Page Analytics  

Finally, this feature can provide an all encompassing view of the logic and partiality of visitors when navigating your site. This can be found by clicking on Content > In-Page Analytics and a screenshot of your website will appear. Scrolling through this area makes it easy to decide which links are getting the most clicks and how the exact percentages break down. For instance, if you have a “Top Posts” or “Recent Posts” widget on the sidebar, it will display which links visitors are most interested in and getting the bulk of traffic.

By looking at the individual pages below the header, you will know which pages are being clicked most. For example, there may be a trend of frequent visitors clicking on the “About” section of your site to learn more information concerning your business. If this page is wanting comprehensive information, it would be smart to spend some time on it. As more data is unearthed, you can make the necessary adjustments to improve site navigation and give visitors the best experience possible. 

How Many Social Buttons Do You actually Need?

Sticking social buttons – Facebook, Twitter and social bookmarking icons – at the peak of articles can help spread your content organically, and also help with universal SEO. Too many of them and your website can create to look messier than a Yahoo toolbar from the early 2000′s.

Too many choices can also dilute the force of the most significant platforms. Here, we take a look at the most well-liked social buttons, explaining our decision process when selecting the significant buttons to use on our casino portal website, roulette.co.uk.

Facebook

With over 1.1 billion users and including, Facebook is by far the most widely used social networking device. It is also the platform that sees the highest levels of appointment by active users. While some users might have fears about sharing gambling-related content via this platform (due to the likelihood that family members and employers might see it), the sheer weight of numbers makes the choice to include a Facebook ‘like’ button a no-brainer.

Twitter

Twitter is the second most well-liked social platform, with over 500 million users, 200 million of which can be considered ‘active’. It’s a much more open method of communication than Facebook, as users can ‘follow’ whoever they want, rather than the close-knit, exclusive personal networks optimistic by Facebook. This makes it a very effective platform for sharing and spreading content, so we felt that including a Twitter button was a must.

Google+

Google claims that their social platform now has 343 million ‘active’ users, making it the fastest-growing social network on the web. Just how active these users in reality are is questionable, as the levels of engagement among these users is a lot lower than with Facebook and Twitter. There are lots of people with Google+ accounts, as extensions of their other Google accounts (Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive etc), but not many of these visit the Google+ homepage on a usual basis to check their news feed.

On the other hand, the Google ‘+1’ button seems to be very helpful from an SEO view, as recent changes to Google’s search ranking algorithm prioritise social shares – particularly on their own service. Because the online casino business is still very search-oriented, we felt that the SEO advantages of a Google+ button made it worth including. However, if we were in another line of business that was mainly driven by social marketing, we might have thought twice about using it.

LinkedIn

This is a button that we had to give a little more thought to. Because LinkedIn is mainly a business-oriented social platform, we were unsure about how suitable it would be, or how much visibility would actually be gained by people sharing content on it. It’s not, generally speaking, a platform that people use as a source of activity or links to interesting articles, certainly not in the way that Facebook and Twitter are. Most users joined the network for the purposes of job hunting, recruiting, and keeping in touch with business networks.

The most attractive statistic, from the perspective of a casino website, was that 12% of LinkedIn users seek gaming information online, as opposed to the average of 7% for other social networks. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that those people are using LinkedIn to find this information, as the vast bulk of traffic for gambling-related websites still comes through search engines and banner ads. So while we decided against it on space grounds, we might well decide to include a LinkedIn button in future.

StumbleUpon / Digg / Delicious

A few years ago, it seemed as if social bookmarking services might actually take off as a way for people to share and meet new content on the internet. However, the whole concept never really took off on a large scale, as people seem more interested in what their Facebook and Twitter connections are recommending.

The use of these widgets has declined sharply over the last year, which has coincided with the rise of Google+ and Pinterest, telling that bloggers and webmasters are getting rid of social bookmarking buttons to make room for these.

However, with most users being indisposed to share gambling-related content via social platforms, the relative anonymity of these services can still be a highly effective driver for additional traffic to websites such as ours. For that reason, we’ve sustained to use the StumbleUpon social widget, although we might review the situation in the near future if usage continues to refuse.

Reddit

Reddit is successfully an online magazine consisting of web-sourced content voted for by its readers. It has a comparatively small (compared to Facebook) but very excited following, with its 69.9 million users reading 4.8 billion pages every month. However, from looking at the type of articles that are highly visible on Reddit, we felt that their relatively user base was unlikely to hold casino-related content, and that the inclusion of a Reddit button would only clutter the space above or below our articles.

Pinterest

According to Alexa rankings, Pinterest is the 42nd busiest site in the world, and like other fast-growing social media outlets, it is being gradually more used for business and marketing purposes. However, it seems to have a very specific audience, with 82% of users being female, and their primary benefit being hobbies and crafts, interior design, and fashion, which fits in well with the format of the site. For these reasons, we felt that users were unlikely to respond to or share our content via this service, so on balance we decided that a ‘Pin It’ button was not mainly appropriate to our content marketing needs.

Rosalind Franklin and Photo 51 privileged in Google Doodle

On what would have been her 93rd birthday, today's Google Doodle honors Rosalind Franklin. Franklin took an X-ray diffraction image of the DNA molecule in 1952. The image was called Photo 51 and was the significant piece to identifying the structure and symphony of DNA.

"We're wishing a happy birthday to British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, whose work was critical to our understanding of DNA and RNA and led to the innovation of the DNA double helix," Google announced via Google+.

Today's logo depicts Franklin in the second "O," staring through her X-ray tubes, which stand for the "G" at a double helix, representing the "l." The Google "e" is an image of what DNA looked like.

Franklin was the daughter of an rich British family who attended Newnham College and King's College. Her early areas of research were with coal, detailing its permeability.

It was her work that led to the use of coal as a fuel, as well as a filter for gas masks. Her work with coal was the basis for her theory, earning her a PhD from Cambridge University.

As a research associate at King's College London, Franklin was assigned to work with then-student Raymond Gosling. Her facts of chemistry and X-ray diffraction led to her photograph.

Her research and papers contributed to the understanding of the composition of both the A-DNA and B-DNA molecules as helices.

In later years, three other researches were approved information on Franklin's research. Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins later mapped the double helix. Their work earned them a Nobel Prize in 1962, four years after Franklin died of ovarian cancer.

Although best known for her work on mapping DNA, Franklin also used X-ray crystallography to study the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) and researched RNA, specially in regards to RNA viruses. While immensely sick and undergoing cancer treatment, Franklin and her research team produced 13 papers in the last two years leading up to her death in 1958.

Posthumously, Franklin has been familiar in a number of ways. King's College in London named a dormitory Rosalind Franklin Hall and an academic building named the Franklin-Wilkins building. The American National Cancer Institute recognized the Rosalind E. Franklin Award for Women in science. In 2004, The Chicago Medical School renamed its Finch University to the Rosalink Franklin University of Medicine and Science. 

Limited Edition Link Building approach

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Google Accounts for almost 25% of All U.S. Internet Traffic

Google has set a latest Internet record. Twenty-five percent of all Internet traffic in the U.S. on average involves Google, according to a new study by Deepfield published this week. This is upbeat from 6 percent in 2010 when a similar study was conducted.

Deepfield cites the use of thousands of Google servers as the most significant change since 2010. Google Global Cache, a content delivery stand reaching more than 100 countries, now has servers in the mass of U.S. Internet providers, according to Deepfield.

Deepfield's findings show 60 percent of all Internet end devices and users exchange traffic with Google servers during the course of an average day, with "computers and mobile device as well as hundreds of varieties game consoles, home media appliances and other embedded devices."

Deepfield noted that Google's device share is truly much larger when focused solely on computers and mobile devices.
The study showed Google was rivaled in bandwidth by only one: Netflix. "But Netflix peaks last only for a few hours each evening during prime time hours and during Netflix cache update period in the early morning," Deepfield said.

What's more, Deepfield stated that Google Analytics, hosting and advertising played some kind of role "in over half of all large web services or sites today."

Deepfield said its ongoing study is unlike than "web bug-based" measurements like Alexa and comScore because it uses core Internet infrastructure like routers and includes traffic from browsers and devices like Apple TV, Roku, Xbox 360, mobile apps and so on.

Could Google Authorship Offer defense Against Future Google Updates?

After the roll out of Penguin 2.0 by Matt Cutts and the Google Web spam Team, the SEO business as a whole is just starting to get to the bottom of who was hit and why. The ins and outs of the latest Penguin installation are one more story altogether; however, it’s surely not going to be long pending people start asking ‘what’s next?’

Matt Cutts has previously outlined what is in store for SEO’s this summer in a recent blog post and video. Only a small part of this seems to have been rolled out with Penguin 2.0. Matt did say that they were the updates currently being worked on and that they would be rolled out in the next few months. It looks likely that Penguin 2.0 isn’t going to be this year’s only major update and that there’s plenty more to come.

Higher Rankings For Industry establishment

One particular point which Matt touched upon was the idea of higher search engine ranking positions for those sites and individuals deemed to be an authority in their industry. To quote from the video: “We have also been working on a lot of ways to help usual webmasters. We’re doing a better job of detecting when someone is sort of an authority in a exact space and trying to make sure that those rank a little more greatly.”

Is ‘Author Rank’ Set To quake Up The Search World?

On that front, it looks as though this could well be the theory of ‘author rank’ which has been doing the rounds more than ever over the past few months. The process of putting your name to a part of content, via your Google Plus profile, could offer some form of protection against hope Google algorithm updates.

When you think about it, it makes complete sense. If a webmaster or business owner is regularly putting out high quality and reliable content, then they deserve to be rewarded for that. If a genuine figure of authority is sharing their industry knowledge and understanding on a regular basis and putting out content which people actually want to read, then why shouldn’t their website rank highly on the search engines?

On these grounds, it seems only fitting that having authorship in place, alongside distributing high quality content, will offer protection against the coming updates. To put in a different light, will see those who create high quality and visible content rewarded whilst those who continue to publish ‘borderline’ content under anonymous profiles will be the ones who undergo.

Think Of Authorship as a Protective Shield

Perhaps we need to think of authorship as a protective shield. As you create and distribute content within your niche, you build up this level of protection. By creating high quality content, you are standing up and saying, “I’m an industry authority, here’s my reason through the content which I create and distribute.”. By publicly sharing all of the content which you author via your Google + profile, you’re opening everything up to Google. This provides credibility.

As far as I’m worried, it seems only right that as ‘author rank’ develops and potentially rolls out into Google’s main algorithm, those who regularly create, publish and deal out high quality and unique content are rewarded for it to a greater extent than is currently the case. We’re all aware that webmasters are already rewarded for creating great content; however, I suspect going forward that those linked with authorship markup to their Google + profiles will see an extra level of protection from algorithm updates. This is based on the grounds that if they’re displaying their content for all to see, as well as simply creating it, then they are a easily identifiable as a visible industry authority.

A Great Author Deserves credit And Reward

It’s still speculation as to the form which ‘author rank’ will take, if and when it ever materialises. However, it seems only fitting that those who have linked their websites and Google + profiles together via authorship markup will benefit from it. At the end of the day, any great author deserves recognition and reward for their work.

Have you linked your website with your Google + profile via authorship markup? If you have, then great! You’re already going to be well on your way to building up an in-depth portfolio of your online content and are in a great position to benefit from the content of ‘author rank’. If you haven’t, then what are you waiting for?

It’s easy and simple to link the two together. When you’ve done this, you will benefit from increased click through rates. To find out how you can rapidly and easily link your site and Google + profile.

Do you agree that Google authorship offers protection against upcoming updates? I’d be very concerned to hear your own opinions on this much talked about concept.

How to boost Conversions for Your top Performing Keywords

This post will sketch a six-step procedure to help you figure out which keywords are driving conversions, and actionable steps to develop the performance of your best and worst performing terms, so you can create even more conversions.

Step 1: Find Keywords that Convert

This tread assumes you have Google Analytics installed on your site and you have goal tracking set up.

There are a few ways to expose keywords that convert on your site. You can either make a custom report to isolate unique visits and goal completions by keyword. Or you can yourself drill down into your traffic sources and isolate goals as they correspond to keywords.

Step 2: Find equivalent URLs

You also want to determine which pages on your site are powerful these keyword conversions. So the next step is to click on "secondary dimension," and select Traffic Sources>Landing Page from the drop down menu.

Step 3: Find Out Where Those Keywords Rank

Now that you have your list of the top converting keywords for your site, you want to determine where they rank.

Again, the aim here is to get these keywords to work even harder for you, which means getting those terms to rank higher improve their visibility. So you need to determine current SERP position.

As for rank tracking, my preferred tools are:

• Link Assistant

• Microsite Masters

Step 4: Create Your Keyword Conversion Report

Once you have keyword rankings, you can explode that info to your spreadsheet along with your list of keywords, corresponding URLs, and conversion rates. Keep visits in the mix as well, since it's another helpful data point, and keyword demand can help you prioritize.

What we naturally find during this process are keywords that exchange, but aren't ranking as high as they could be. This presents some really great opportunities because if you can develop SERP visibility for some or all of your top converting keywords, you can exponentially grow conversions.

You can prioritize your hard work in a number of ways as well and determine whether to focus on:

• The highest ranking terms.

• The highest converting terms.

• The highest traffic terms.

Step 5: Focus on Improving Rankings for Those Keywords

Next steps are to improve the rankings for your top converting keywords. This means working on both on-site and off-site SEO tactics, which include:

• On-page SEO: 

• Beefing up content

• Internal linking

• Inbound linking 

• Social signals

Step 6: Iterate Across Your Site

OK, so you've unearthed your top converting keywords. You've mapped those keywords to corresponding URLs. You know where they rank. And you're working to develop those rankings to grow conversions  even more.

The next step, it's time to influence that proprietary intelligence that you acquired during this process and apply it to keywords that are underperforming on your site.