UK SEO Consultant | Just Search's Neil Walker

The big question for many developers, user experience specialists and conversion / split test experts is always about browsers. The Web development community have said a firm “NO” to development in IE6 but still some client request it.

So this is one of a series of articles I will be writing in the next few weeks where I have pulled the data from between 200-500 Google Analytics accounts using http://www.analyticscanvas.com/ this is just a good way of aggregating data.

Anyway after talking with Paddy Moogan @Distilled at SASCon last week, I told him what i’d been doing with data analysis and he said “I want to know if chrome has taken over firefox yet”.

Well the data is based on 209 websites, for the month of April 2011 and consists of 4,108,498 website visits.

And the winner is: Internet Explorer still with 51% share of the market but then Firefox and Chrome are a chunk behind with Chrome in second with 17% and Firefox 16%.

Browser Conversion

Well the beaty about having Google analytics data is that you can set up goals so you can also view browser conversion. The below shows Chrome and Firefox user convert more than IE or Safari.

seomad.com/SEOBlog/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Browser-v2.jpg”>

Finally the last part to this post is about browser version with particular reference to IE6:

So IE6 2% of traffic, whats that worth to you?

i will be producing this every quarter from now on so next one in July/August 2011

Its been many month since I posted on my blog, but its been a hectic few months I attended Domain Fest in LA spoke at Traffic Dublin, Spoke at RIMC11 in Iceland (Awesome) I carried out a presentation at Internet World (Will push a blog out in the next week or so) and I did the SASCOn wrap up (Slight different presentation technique than I normally use), but after speaking with Dave Naylor, Rishil, Basvandenbeld ,Bary Adams, yoast, nichola stott, Pete Young, The hodge, Paddy Morgan amoung too many others I thought I really should start blogging more, so this post is about segmenting data from link profiles.

You may remeber this post on Blog Storm by Patrick Altoft about link profiles and exporting back link data from OSE (Open Site Explorer) to produce a profile graph.

Well I really liked this visual way of presenting data, but you can expand on this by segmenting the information further.

Guide:

• Carry out some keyword research and get yourself a good list of phrases 10-20 to concentrate on.
• Next do a few quick searches on Google and check in an excel doc which sites appear for mulitple phrases.
  (The purpose for this is to find a general competing website and not a site competing for a specific phrase only.)

• We can then choose two or three sites which appear under the most phrases “This is our competition.”
• Go to Opensite explorer and download the data (you will need a PRO account)
• Once you have downloaded all the data for your site and the competitors we start a little bit of manual work.
• Add a column to you excel sheet after anchor text of: ” Anchor Type” then quickly label the anchor text as the following:
  - Brand (i.e. www.site.com or branded phrases or redirecting sites)
  - Misc.  (Words that have no meaning i.e. Click here, website)
  - Keyword (Keyword influenced phrases.)
• I also like to make two further columns
  - 1) Internal or Domain links
  - 2) Label the main site (help distinguish between profiles)

See image below:

Now once you’ve done this the fun starts

Or it means we can analyse the following:

• Link profile graphs
• Type of profile (Brand, Misc, keyword)
• Top anchor texts for keyword
• Anchor ratios (good for spotting drops in rankings)
• What pages have the key links.
• Internal (Deep) to Domain link profiles.
• No. of anchor text variations

(To be honest, you can do some of this using Opensite explorer anyway, but adding in the brand element and more comopeitors makes it easier to choose a strategy of solve a problem.) - depending on the competition this will take about 20-30 minutes to carry out properly.

So now we have all the data together lets start constructing some useful information:

Profile Graphs:

To produce this graph make a pivot chart using Page Authority as the ‘row’ then website as the column and use a count function for no of links.

Anchor text Type:

Next change the pivot table by using site as the row and anchor type as the column. This shows us the following:

seomad.com/SEOBlog/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/anchor-text-types-v1.jpg”>

This is useful to be able to start to plan your link building efforts.

Top Anchor Texts:

Now use anchor type as the pivot filter, put anchor text as the row and site as the column, you can now view your comeptitors top anchor texts.

Domain versus Deep links

Create a table showing site by Domain/Deep Links:

Anchor Text variations:

Next change the pivot table to show anchor text as the row and website as the column, quickly count the number of rows whcih correspond to each site and make a table, this will then show you the numbner of anchor text variations used for each site, this shows you one of two things:

1. How natural a link campaign is
2. How large the competitor site is.

You will often note on sites that drop listings, the percentage ratio is high showing often a unnatural link profile.

Strategy:

Once the above has been carried out, you can undertake your SEO plan i.e. Which page you are going to build links for what anchor text you may use (Also carry out further keyword research).

I use the type of reserach when either:

• Problem solving
• looking for initial sales strategy.
• Keyword research (using competitors)

I hope you find this article useful.

SASCON, Search, Social Media and Analytics conference in Manchester UK. This was my short presentation to wrap up the two day conference.

Edit: 23/05/2011)

So for anyone that witnessed the #SASCON wrap up, it was somthing a little different, not my usual presentation technique but I will say I did a very tounge and cheek hip hop version of a presentation i wrote for internet world. Above is the version I recorded with the full slide shows and original verse.

Below is the special live version at the end of the SASCOn conference.

also I just noticed someone recorded it right from the back of the conference room (how funny)

Back down to earth

it was a lot of fun doing this and at least @peteyoung know that if I say somthing drunk that I will actually go through with it. Any way my key takeaways from SASCOn were the Location, Location, Location panel, Negative SEO and SEO for Wordpress I didn’t get see many of the other presentations but did meet a lot of good people in the industry… See you next year SASCON