Anatomy of the URL and Stuff

I'm sure you are looking at the URL above and thinking to yourself; "Wow, I never realized that all that stuff meant something." Oddly enough it actually does... As the world wide web has changed into a search friendly, user interactivity playground, the formation and meaning of the URL has evolved considerably in to a very significant factor in not only search engine compliance but in how people use websites. Lately I have been helping clients understand how their website's are structured and how servers to browsers to users work. It's something us search optimizers view as something so simple yet can be so complex to someone who doesn't understand how it all works. So here is the URL broken down piece by piece and explained.  

First - What is a URL? 

A Uniform Resource Locator is a website address that holds very important information between each "." and "/" much like an address to your home contains a house number, city, state, country, etc. This allows the browser to connect to a specific website, directory/path, and/or file in order for the user to see what it is on the page you want them to see. A URL consists of the following:

Hypertext Protocol Established by English physicist Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, hypertext protocol is a request/response standard typical in which the client is the application (User on a web browser such as IE, Firefox, safari, etc) and the server which hosts the web site itself. The client submitting HTTP requests is typically referred to as a user-agent (or user) with the responding server—which stores or creates resources such as files (html, .asp, .php, css, etc) and images—referred to as the origin server.*

  WWW (World Wide Web) or "sub-domain" 

The WWW is typically placed before the main domain of your website URL, referencing the World Wide Web. Remember the game you played in elementary school where you could start your home address with your house number, street, city, state and then go off as far as your country, continent, and even earth. The WWW is the address starting with "earth". In some cases, what we call a "sub-domain" can replace the WWW in your URL, which references a whole new website within your existing domain. Search optimizers can use this as a way to target certain key terms. For example, a real estate agent targeting a specific city will use http://city.domain.com and thus will have a leg up when ranking for anything within that city. In most cases the sub-domains will link to the main domain and, since they are treated by most search engines as a domain all it's own, then it will count as an external link credit, boosting the rankings for the main domain it is linking to. It is highly recommended that you avoid this technique as it is only tricking the search engines and in the end will hurt your rankings rather than help. 

  Domain Naming System (or DNS) 

The domain naming system was established so that the common user can understand in simple terms the location of a web site. A web site's files are usually stored on a server that points to a specific IP address (much like a phone number directs someone's call to your phone). In order for the general public to understand where to locate a certain website and it's files, the specific domain name resolves to that particular IP address. In addition, the Domain Name System also stores other types of information, such as the list of mail servers that accept email for a given domain (such as you@yourdomain.com). 

Top-level Domain Extension 

The domain extension originally consisted of the generic gov, edu, com, mil, and org. With the growth of the internet, the addition of country extensions and other such categories have come into play. The most recognized of the extensions is of course the .com. If you are optimizing for a specific country and language, then the best route to take is to register your domain with that specific country's extension. This will help the search engines recognize that you are targeting that particular audience and will rank that site accordingly. Be sure that your country specific site is in the native language for that country to avoid any duplicate content issues. Do also be careful of linking from that domain to your main domain as once again the site will be penalized. 

Directories and Files 

Here's where the fun stuff comes into play. Just as your computer organizes your word doc, excel, and other such files into folders, a server structures your website files in the same way. A "directory" or "path" is much like a "folder" is on your computer. In standard (old school) html development (before the days of creating dynamic websites powered by databases and user interactivity) a file would be created and named "index.html" or "default.html" and placed either on the main domain folder (in which the DNS resolves to on the server) or placed in a named folder (in order to help the webmaster organize the site's files). As the technology grew and more ways to develop websites with user interactivity and database driven websites advanced, the structure has pretty much stayed the same with the addition of "parameters" that reference a part of the database and returns content and such on a page based on those parameters. (have I lost you yet?) Let's go back to the basic structure of the static html files and go from there...

A Dynamic website is one that has a few static pages (in other words the pages are coded and are only editable by a developer) that have parameters that will pull in content or trigger specific actions from a database. The basics of a dynamic page is one that pulls words, images, etc from a database and can do so creating multiple pages with different content from one basic page. A more complex dynamic page (or site) is something like Facebook, or Twitter in which they recognize whether or not you are signed in with a username and password and will show you either your profile page (if you are signed in) or a "please sign up" page (if you are not signed in or don't have an established username).

In order to help understand this let's talk about how a database works. A database is essentially similar to that of an excel spreadsheet or table in a word document that has a unique identifier for each line (or row) and holds different content for each line item. Example:

	Email	First Name	Last Name
Sujo234	bob@bobsemail.com	Bob	Sujo
Forjill23	jill@jillsemail.com	Jill	Forman

Username

In this example the username is the unique identifier with the email, first name, and last name as different parameters for that username.

The content will be different on each page. With dynamic content the possibilities are endless as far as how many pages you can create from developing and design just one file. A great example of how a dynamic page is created for search optimization purposes is on usedcars.com - If you search for "used cars in oslo mn" you see the "UsedCars.com Oslo MN" page in the results. Look at the URL in the address bar when you go to that particular page - http://www.usedcars.com/browse/mn-24/oslo-163.aspx. In this case the page is pulling in the unique ID that is equal to "OSLO 163" and "MN 24", just as the username is the unique ID in the above table.  

SEO Friendly URL 

In order to make your dynamic URL friendly for search engines you must use a rewrite. A great resource for rewriting a URL is the Apache Rewriting Guide. Some open source content management systems (such as Wordpress, Drupal, etc) already do the rewriting for you and all you have to do is enter what you want the URL to be (be sure to include your key terms separated with dashes "-" and not underscores "_" for search happiness) Who would have thought a URL could be so complicated? But when it comes to search optimization and understanding basic website development it is very important to understand how the URL works, how it is structured, and how to make sure your site is URL and search engine compliant. *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Http_protocol

Facetwitetiquette - How to Suck at Facebook and Twitter

Facebook

What not to do on Facebook

	The constant Gardener, Mafia Hitman, Virtual Pet Owner, or Whatever the updates and invites never end...
	The Bad Marketer become a fan, join my group, comment on one of my million updates...
	The Crude Photo Tagger tagging everything from that party last night you don't remember to taking shots off of a girls belly button.
	The Rash following you around commenting on all your posts and liking every photo...
	The Unfiltered they post everything and anything...
	The Most Popular Person EVAR inviting everyone to everything...
	The Twitterfied linking twitter updates to Facebook flooding their profile with meaningless tweets...
	The Bored Quizzer taking every quiz available...
	The Passive Aggressor posting well thought out updates without mentioning names...
	The Annoyingly Proud Parent using their child as their profile pic...

Twitter

What not to do on Twitter

	The Unproductive Tweeter tweets updating every minute...
	The Retweeter retweeting everything they see...
	The Conversationalist bouncing back and forth between one person...
	The Untweeter Tweeting from Foursquare, tweetmeme, or the like...

Categorizing Keywords

For those of you SEO's that manage very large sites and map your keyword categories to sections of your website - you know how difficult it is to categorize your terms and track their performance. Well, I have to say that after searching, asking, and digging around for a tool that does exactly what I am talking about, I finally came up with a solution. It's a bit of a workaround in Excel - but it's the best I can do until someone comes up with a tool that categorizes keywords for SEO.

Know Your Keywords and Categories

Before you get started categorizing the terms that come to your site, you should know what keywords you are targeting, and the combinations of terms as well. I'm going to use a flower shop's website as an example for this particular blog post. Categorizing is something you can do with any website. At the very least, you can categorize terms into "Broad" and "Branded", to get you started.

Most keyword tools can help you establish what categories to target. Google's Keyword Tool or WordTracker are just a couple of the many tools available on the web.

Another way to figure out terms that fit in categories is by grabbing search data (referring terms in Google Analytics) on your site for the past few months or year. I personally spent some time going through and categorizing keywords in Excel by using the filters and then having the sheet show all words including "anniversary" for terms around "anniversary flowers". It takes a lot of work and time, but in the long run you will have a more accurate account of the terms you will need to do the Lookup against.

Setting Up Your Template

Download the Template

Now that you have all the terms possible in all of your categories it's time to start setting up your template. You are going to want to Download the template I have set up in Excel. You can start from a fresh Excel document if you want, but the template has directions (in case you lose this blog post somehow) and the Lookup formula is in there.

Once you have downloaded the template it's time to get it set up to work for your keywords.

In the following steps - I am going to walk you through setting up the template and then categorizing the terms. If you don't have terms that you can use already, I have a zip file you can download and walk through the example with me to get familiar with how this works.

Copy and paste your first set of categorized terms and paste them into the first Tab marked "Broad". Since every site usually has a "Broad" category of terms, I figure that's probably the best to get started with. In the case of this example "flower shop", "online flower shop", and "best flower shop" terms are the ones that fit under the Broad category.

If you have the .zip folder downloaded, open up the "Terms" Excel doc and you will see the words already categorized for you. There are "Broad", "Branded", "Birthday", "Anniversary", and "Wedding". Click the Drop Down next to "Category" and click "select all (to deselect all) and then click "Broad". You will see all of the terms sort by just that "Broad" category.

Next select all of the terms in the "Keyword" list - copy and paste them into the "Broad" Tab.
We will then need to sort the terms in alphabetical order so that the Lookup string can go through them in order. If you don't then the Lookup won't work.


Highlight the Column with your keywords
Click "data" > "sort"

Select "My data has headers"
Select under "sort by" the column you keywords are under (should be column A)
Click OK

Double click the Tab and rename it with the one word name of your category.
Highlight all of your keywords in the column (just the cells that have words, not any blank cells).
Type the name of the category (stick to one word naming) into the upper left field. You have now named your table.

Do this for "Branded" and the other categories as well. You are going to have to create a new tab in the template to fit all the categories.

If you have not downloaded the .zip file and are working off of your own terms, creating new tabs and naming them is probably going to be something you will need to do. But don't worry, the template will still work.

Now that you have all of your keywords in your Template's Tabs with names and sorted it's time to set up your Lookup string.

Setting up Your Lookup

The way the Lookup works in this case is we are going to ask Excel to look at one Keyword (one cell) and match it up to one of the terms in the Tabs we have set up. If it matches one of those terms then we tell Excel to place the word into that Cell. If it doesn't, then we just leave that cell blank.

The string looks like this:
=IF(ISNA(VLOOKUP(B2,Broad,Broad!A$2:Broad!A$999998,FALSE)),"","Broad")

• B2 is the cell of the keyword we want to look for.
• the first "Broad" is the Table name we want to look for that keyword in.
• Broad!A$2:Broad!A$9999998 is the Tab and range that the Table exists in.
• FALSE is telling the Lookup to do an exact match. TRUE would look through to see if letters from that Keyword exist in the Cells we are looking in, so in this case it won't work.
• We leave the ,"", as a blank - but you can put "not categorized" or "misc" to show that it isn't in a category. Though for our purposes here, we keep it blank.
• ,"Broad" is telling Excel to put the word "Broad" in the cell if the keyword matches one of those in the Broad Table or Tab.

See - it's that easy...

What you are going to do next is replace the word "Broad" or "Cat1" with the name of your table, Tab, and category. This is why we name the Table, the Tab, and the Category the same so that our life is much easier when setting this string up.

Now your template is ready for you to paste some keywords with data and grab some numbers.

Gathering Your Data

Open up your Google Analytics account - if you don't have Google Analytics, pretty much any tracking tool that has a list of referring terms with some sort of data is fine. You can expand and contract the columns to the right of the terms as you wish. The template you will download will have the columns set up just for the purpose of exporting referring terms with visits and such from Google Analytics though.

Log into your Google Analytics account.
Click "Traffic Sources" > "Sources" > "Search" > "Organic"
Select the date range you would like to report on.
Scroll to the bottom of the report and show 5,000 rows.
Scroll back to the top and click "Export" the select "CSV".
After the file has downloaded, open the excel file.
Highlight JUST the cells that include the keywords and your data (ignore the first few at the top with date and information, and the bottom that summarize the data and below).
Copy those cells, and paste into your "Master" Tab.

Note: If you have multiple dates you would like to track, you can export the different date ranges, and then add which keywords go with what date in the Master Tab. This will allow you to see trends of categories.

I added an Excel doc called "Analytics Organic Search Traffic" with some terms and fake data that you can play with. There are three tabs that I added dates for each day's data. Start with just the one day and play with that to get familiar with percentages. From there you can play with all three dates and work on your trends to see what categories are trending up and down.

Completing Your Lookup

Now that you have copied and pasted the keywords into the "Master" Tab it's time to get all of those terms categorized.

Select the top row with your categories and your "All Categories" cell
Copy just those cells in the top row

Highlight the next row (same cells just below) hold down the "shift" key
Scroll down to the last keyword record
Holding down the shift key select the last cell under the "All categories" - this highlights all of those cells for those categories to Lookup the keywords.
Hit "CTRL+V" on your keyboard (this quickly pastes the Lookup formulas for each line)
Be patient, as it may take a while for your Lookup to complete (depending on how many keywords, and records you have)
The "Master" Tab should look something like this:

Playing With Your Data

The most efficient way to gather information from your data is to copy the entire "Master" Tab and paste as values into a new Excel sheet.  This way you won't have to wait for the Lookup to complete each time you sort, pivot, etc.

Click the top left "Arrow" in the "Master" Tab
Right Click and select "Copy"
Open a new Excel Doc
Right Click and select

From here you can create pivot tables then sort them into pie charts, graphs, and all sorts of fun reports to see how your keywords are performing.

I personally like to start with a quick pie chat to see what category of terms brings int he most traffic. At times we will have a drop or rise in traffic, and it's good to understand which category of terms are fluctuating. By copying and pasting terms by dates (weeks, months, or even a set of a few days) will help me see which categories are fluctuating on a timeline trend. Knowing which categories bring int he most traffic, I can then make decisions on which parts of the website we need to focus our efforts on to increase traffic.

See how much fun categorizing your terms can be?
Now that I have a template I work off of, when traffic goes up I can quickly categorize the terms and let our executives know if our recent efforts have worked.