A few days ago, I was talking with SEO consultant Chris Price, an organic search specialist and Logaholic customer. Chris told me how Logaholic had been one of the tools he used to achieve a Google #1 position for their SEO keywords. And the metrics he was looking at especially, are not what you would expect.

Chris has some great insights about Search Engine Optimisation and I’m glad he agreed to share some of the conversation with everyone. So, here goes:

Chris, please tell us more about your #1 on Google for a popular SEO keyword.

Yes Michael. It’s for my preferred keyphrase, ‘search optimising’. There’s a lot of competition for that – and it’s not the least competitive term in SEO, by the way! Any main keyword in SEO was heavily subscribed years ago, so it isn’t easy to get #1 for them, there are less than 10 and everyone in the world is looking to place for them. All the top SEO people. And that’s on Google.com by the way, and also on many of the country-specific ones, though I didn’t check all of them – so it’s a world #1 spot. Also, on the others, like Google.nl for instance, we are #1, 2, and 3 – one of those is to a social site I have a section on. I checked out the .nl one just for you, Michael!

Er, thanks. A number one for that kind of keyword is truely impressive though! The amazing thing is that this is a new site right?

Yes. I had something to prove here. Most people say this can’t be done, there is a sandbox. I don’t agree. Except for Yahoo, there is one there, but not the others – they always talk about the Google sandbox, but we don’t see it. Yahoo needs a stronger form of optimising anyway. It affects PageRank, for sure, but that is not always the same thing as positioning well.

We had to rebrand for various reasons and bought a new domain name in June. The site opened in mid-July. On September 14th we were #1 on Google, that’s after only eight weeks. You’ll find a hundred SEO guys to say that can’t be done. Not without spamming and cloaking anyway! We did it by perfect on-site optimising and some quality links, and other natural search methods. All organic, all white-hat*. And it didn’t cost a bean – we don’t spend money on ads unless it is vital. Not our own money, anyway! I also wanted to prove that much of what is said is wrong in some circumstances – it depends on what works for you, not what the textbook says. I don’t do a lot of the things they say are important, like heavy keyword ratios, H1 tags and all that. Main keyword in the page heading on page 1 – all that stuff. In theory my site shouldn’t be anywhere, going by the book! It is optimised for people, not search engines.

Is the number 1 position on Google really important?

Yes and no. For many sites it wouldn’t be the best position. The quick-clickers who always hit the number one result aren’t usually the buyers that you need, they are just looking something up, not researching heavily, not looking to buy. You want people who have picked your site because it really has something to offer them. For that reason, in many cases a #2 or 3 spot would be more productive in the end. The exception of course is an MFA site, ‘made for Adsense’, they work great in the #1 spot, people click on them and then leave their site via an ad – that’s fine. That’s how they earn their money.

So, you seem to be saying, I think, that big traffic – visitors – is not what you aim for?

Sort of! You need the big numbers, sure – but they absolutely must be targeted. People must be after what you have. The reason you need to get more of them, which is good, is that you have to find ways to let the world know you are there – and that your product or service is best. You need more of the people who are trying to find you. You could easily create large numbers of visitors, it’s not that hard – but they would be no use to you at all, except maybe for advert revenue. We don’t primarily aim for that, it’s just an extra.

You need hits, then, but the right kind. How do you measure that?

Firstly, I don’t care anything about hits, requests, or page views, or those kind of things. The only thing I worry about is visits/ visitors/ unique visitors/ or ‘uniques’, even – whatever your favourite stats application calls that. Individual people. I don’t really know what hits means actually – and I don’t care. I follow the metrics for people, and that’s what we work to. The number of visitors per day, per week, per month – that’s what pays.
OK, ‘pageviews’ is very important in PPC campaigns but I work mainly with organic SEO. It’s cheaper in the medium/ long term, more effective, and much more efficient. It lasts a very, very long time; but PPC visitors stop when you stop paying. My partner does the PPC so I like to wind him up now and then!

Do you have any special ways you use web analytics, Chris?

Yes – but I can’t tell you! Actually, no, to be serious. You just have to know your tools well, and use them to the full extent. At that stage, they will start to work for you. I like Logaholic, as you know, partly because I’m not so good with figures, and the presentation is very sharp. Statistics is a word that puts me right off, I’m not a maths guy – but now the stats apps cut all that out, you get the results without the maths. Believe me, I love that! Yes, yes, I’ll mention Logaholic here, don’t worry… You know I prefer it.

Some things I use a lot in Logaholic are the Referrers and their details, and page tracking of various sorts. Personally, I prefer this to Google Analytics and AWstats put together. For me, it does the trick. If you can get the trigger pages (Key Performance Indicators or Target Pages) on your website working for you, on a sales success, Logaholic is even better. There are so many things you can track then.

I know that you have put a lot of work into getting the PPC metrics right in Logaholic, Michael. You yourself use that a lot, I know. I’m sure that data makes you money – but my personal interest is in the ‘people’ data – what countries they come from, what pages they land on, what they look at, how long they spend on different pages, this sort of thing. That is immensely useful for tuning, and for marketing as well. It even tells me some things even the owner didn’t know about his customers, before we put Logaholic in – and naturally he gains from it.

Website statistics are vital for sales performance of course – but are there other ways they are useful?

You have hit the nail on the head here. It is vitally important now to eliminate site errors. I’m talking about the serious ones that really p*** off the search engines. For example, 302 errors must be totally eliminated. You just can’t do that with most stats apps because they don’t give you the info you need, you can’t find the errors. Logaholic does. You can get all your dead links, missing images, that sort of thing, yes – but you have to get the serious ones or you get what I call an SRP – a search results penalty. It’s a ban, or various levels of it. They can easily give you a penalty for some of these errors, and many site owners just aren’t aware of it. There are a lot of sites being partially banned now – you get a penalty on your SERPs positions but you don’t really know about it, the results are poor but you don’t know why. Of course, the search engines don’t tell you when this happens.

And as you know, Logaholic is one of the very few web analytics tools that actually takes error reporting seriously.

Ouch, I have a few 302 redirects in my site, I didn’t know that was penalised. I’ll have to take care of that.
I see on your site you have a section on banned websites – what is that about?

Yes, this is something more important every day I think. A lot of sites are getting banned now, only I don’t really call it that, I say penalised. There are levels, you don’t know it’s there sometimes – it can maybe only be a small penalty. In other cases there is no doubt at all – with a malware penalty they stick a big warning notice on your site name in the search results, it looks really weird. You can’t click through. Most of these penalties are for errors or bad management – they are trying to get people to clean up their act. People talk about duplicate content but it goes much deeper than that, there are a lot of things that can get you penalised. You have to clean up your act, then run clean. Metrics are vital for that. So many owners don’t seem to have any figures for their sites, stuff like error numbers, network monitoring and so on. It’s crazy.

What is your advice to get the top ranks, the top search results?

Not too hard to answer that one, but lots of time input I’m afraid – you need quality links and very good content. Each of those takes time to get done. Some SEO experts say you don’t need the content now. OK, but whatever you can state in SEO is right for some sites, wrong for others. It depends. For my system, we need content and it never fails. An authority site with strong content, that has credibility, and good links – not link exchanges or that sort of stuff – that site will always be strong. You can’t do that with zero content. To me, all the top sites have some kind of killer content – you might not recognise it as that but it’s there – so that’s what I try to work for.

It helps if you can optimise the site and page code well of course, but there are a lot of different routes you can take there. I never do some of the things I hear top experts recommending – and I do some things they say are no good. It works for me – you can’t argue about Google #1, 2, and 3 in SEO – all done 100% white hat. As an example, I never use an H1 heading tag. Well, hardly ever. You won’t find one on my sites, except where a client insisted and we are testing the result. For example I have one client with an ecommerce site who has around eight Google world #1 spots for his products, against strong competition. And that other site we discussed earlier is up 60% on their revenue after 4 months with me, with traffic up 70% (and that also shows beautifully how the traffic is quality visits, not clickers). So you can see my system works exceptionally well.

So, what is your ‘system’ exactly?

I use a developed technical system. I think every SEO consultant has something of the kind, the way they work. I just stress the tech aspects, that and usability. I’m a lifetime engineer and techie, I like the most efficient technical solution. I don’t care about the textbooks, they are usually years out of date. I see what needs to be done and systemise it. This makes for a simple but strong core solution – then you build on that. Forget what everyone else is doing, there is probably some good stuff in there, but you need to identify the most efficient factors and forget about tradition. Every time I see tradition, I see people bogged down in methods that don’t work too well any more. It’s reliable, but don’t expect the best results.

Tradition here of course just means methods that are maybe only 5 or 6 years old. Things move fast in this game. Look, there are always two directly opposing viewpoints in SEO. Take Bruce Clay and Jill Whalen (these are two of the most famous SEO consulting firms). One does everything by the numbers, one says don’t worry, be happy. Their methods obviously work for them, but if they swapped around, they’d come unstuck. I have my own system and it works for me. Probably, if each of us looked at the other’s sites, there would be a lot of faults – in our own minds. Those are both very well known, top SEO firms. They don’t make mistakes. But each would probably criticise the other’s methods. They would criticise me. But whatever we do, it works for us.

You wanted to offer our customers something, didn’t you?

Yes. Thanks for the reminder, Michael – because my new site is quite young, I still need quality links. If anyone with a website with reasonable rank can give me a link, I will gladly do an SEO report for them. I need to state clearly here that they must decide if my site is worth linking to or not – I will do a report and if they decide they don’t want to link to me, that’s fine. Equally, I cannot link to them if their site does not deserve it. This isn’t a throwaway option for me, Michael, it takes me 2 – 3 hours to do that. I don’t skimp, I give it the full works. I’m not satisfied unless I help a client to double their revenue, and this is always the first step, without fail. Of course, if anyone thinks their site or results need improving, I’ll be happy to make out a report for them.

That sounds good! Thanks Chris. What does your trade name mean, by the way?

Hah! Yes, it’s unusual. We have 3 things we work with a lot, organic optimising, usability, and web technology – and our office is close to the A3 route in south-west London.

* ‘White hat’ and ‘black hat’ refer to ethical or unethical methods of SEO.

A3webtech.com currently have #1 and other very high positions for their keywords – not easily achieved in the SEO business, with a brand new site and domain name. So please check out their website:

Search Optimising and Usability
http://www.a3webtech.com