• Brand-to-nonbrand Ratio — percentage of your natural search traffic that comes from brand keywords versus nonbrand keywords

• Unique Pages — number of unique (non-duplicate) web pages crawled by search engine spiders
• Page Yield — percentage of unique pages that yield search-delivered traffic in a given month
• Keyword Yield — average number of keywords each page (minus the freeloaders) yields in a given month
• Visitors per Keyword — ratio of search engine delivered visitors to search terms
• Index-to-crawl Ratio — ratio of pages indexed to unique crawled pages
• Engine Yield — the amount of traffic a search engine delivers for every page it crawls

Brian Klais, vice president of Search at Netconcepts, has been working in web marketing from the very start, will make sure you have the knowledge you need to do the job at hand.

Watch Stephan and Avinash’s webinar as a streaming Flash video »

Or, alternatively download/watch as a Quicktime (m4v) movie (77 MB).

• Making your site “search engine friendly”
• “Pay-per-click” search advertising
• Benchmarking, competitive intelligence and ROI analysis
• Trends in contextual, behavioral and local advertising

Creating a buzz — viral marketing

• Blogs, RSS feeds, forums, wikis and more
• Harness “word of mouse” to enhance your brand
• Identifying the “sneezers” who will spread your viral message

Web analytics

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

• Making your site “search engine friendly”
• “Pay-per-click” search advertising
• Benchmarking, competitive intelligence and ROI analysis
• Trends in contextual, behavioral and local advertising

Creating a buzz — viral marketing

• Blogs, RSS feeds, forums, wikis and more
• Harness “word of mouse” to enhance your brand
• Identifying the “sneezers” who will spread your viral message

Web analytics

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts

* 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 Sitemap XML files to fix your indexation problems (News flash: Your rankings will still stink!).
* Exchanging links.

What’s hot in SEO?

* Truly understanding and leveraging the power of “long tail” dynamics.
* Becoming a trusted contributor within Wikipedia, Digg, StumbleUpon, Netscape and 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 do you measure the impact of this sort of stuff? A new generation of SEO metrics, that’s how. Gauging your success on your positions in the search engine results pages is so last century.

New SEO paradigms, such as the “long tail” and personalized search, call for new key performance indicators (KPIs). In addressing “long tail” SEO specifically, some of my Netconcepts’ colleagues cleverly came up with the following KPIs:

Brand-to-nonbrand Ratio
This is the percentage of your natural search traffic that comes from brand keywords versus nonbrand keywords.

If the ratio is high and most of your traffic is coming from searches for your brand, this signals your SEO is fundamentally broken. The lower the ratio, the more of the “long tail” of natural search you are likely capturing. This metric is an excellent gauge of the success of your optimization initiatives.

Unique Pages
This is the number of unique (non-duplicate) web pages crawled by search engine spiders such as Googlebot.

Your website is like your “virtual sales force” bringing in prospects from the search engines. Think of each unique page as one of your virtual salespeople. The more unique pages you have, the more opportunities you have to sell through the search engines.

Page Yield
This is the percentage of unique pages that yield search-delivered traffic in a given month.

This ratio essentially is a key driver of the length of your “long tail” of natural search. The more pages that yield traffic from search engines, the healthier your SEO program. If you have only a small portion of your website delivering searchers to your door, then most of your pages, your virtual salespeople, are warming the bench instead of working hard for you. My colleague Brian Klais has a name for the webpages that aren’t driving any search traffic — freeloaders.

Keyword Yield
This is the average number of keywords each page (minus the freeloaders) yields in a given month. Put another way, it’s the ratio of keywords to pages yielding search traffic.

The higher your keyword yield, the more of the “long tail” of natural search your site will capture. In other words, the more keywords each yielding page attracts or targets, the longer your tail. So an average of eight search terms per page indicates pages with much broader appeal to the engines than, say, three search terms per page.
The average merchant in our study had 2.4 keywords per page.

Visitors Per Keyword
This is the ratio of search engine delivered visitors to search terms.
This metric indicates how much traffic each keyword drives and is a function of your rankings in the search engine result pages. Put another way, this metric determines the height or thickness of your “long tail.”

The average merchant in our study obtained 1.9 visitors per keyword.

Index-to-crawl Ratio
This is the ratio of pages indexed to unique crawled pages.
If a page gets crawled by Googlebot, that doesn’t guarantee it will show up in Google’s index. A low ratio can mean your site doesn’t carry much weight in Google’s eyes.

Engine Yield
Calculated for each search engine separately, this is how much traffic the engine delivers for every page it crawls.

Each search engine has a different audience size. This metric helps you fairly compare the referral traffic you get from each. In the Netconcepts study, we found that MSN and Yahoo! tend to crawl significantly more pages, but the yield per crawled page from Google is typically significantly higher.

As you optimize your site through multiple iterations, watch the above-mentioned KPIs to ensure you’re heading in the right direction. Those not privy to these metrics will have a much harder time capturing the long tail of SEO.

Webmaster Central began its life as Google Sitemaps, a protocol for submitting a list of your URLs to Google. With it you can let Googlebot know how you want your site crawled. Sitemaps still exists; but the breadth of services expanded so much that it warranted Google changing the name of its webmaster resource area to Webmaster Central last August.

What are some of those services? In a recent interview, Vanessa Fox, product manager at Google Webmaster Central, offered some detail about those tools and resources (interview audio available at Marketingspeak.com/audio/vanessa-fox-interview.mp3).

First, at Webmaster Central, you can be informed if your site is being penalized for a violation, or if it has malware on it, or if Googlebot can’t gain access. Furthermore, the Link Reporting Tool reveals virtually all the links to pages on your site, including the ones that are most often linked, as well as inbound links and internal links. And the PageRank Tool tells you which of your pages has the highest PageRank each month (often it’s not those you expect!) along with a graph that shows the PageRank distribution across all your pages.

If you aren’t ranking well for a particular product or category, you can use these tools to identify missed opportunities or previously unnoticed mistakes. For example, perhaps you have inadvertently severed an internal link to a page you hope will rank well. Webmaster Central’s reports would reveal this problem, which you could then rectify by linking to it from one or more pages well-endowed with PageRank.

Other reports reveal the queries that most often return your site in the search results and the level of traffic those SERPs (search engine results pages) received. How else could you learn which pages of your site receive many impressions in the SERPs but very few clickthroughs? Certainly not through log file analysis!

Google shares which words appear most on your site, and which words are used most often in the anchor text of inbound links.

“If you think your site should be ranking for a word but it doesn’t show up as one of the common words on your site, or as a link to your site, then you may need to optimize a little better for that particular phrase,” Vanessa advises.

Of course you should check whether those words are popular with searchers or not. For that, Webmaster Central offers the Keyword Popularity Data Tool, in order to spot trends and view historical data on the keywords you most care about.

Google also has you covered when it comes to crawlability diagnostics. Webmaster Central reveals the pages that were blocked when Google tried to crawl them. It will also tell you the crawl rate of your site — i.e., how many pages per day, how much data are downloaded, and how long it takes to download a page.

If your site operates at two locations, one at www.yourcompany.com and one at Yourcompany.com, your PageRank will be split across the two sites, resulting in poorer rankings due to the dilution effect. Webmaster Central has a tool to help you rectify this, where you can specify which version you want indexed. That’s handy, but the best scenario — as I have mentioned in numerous SEO Report Cards — is to do a 301 redirect to aggregate both versions into one. It certainly won’t hurt to use the tool within Webmaster Central as an additional measure.

That’s an invaluable list of tools, wouldn’t you agree? On top of that, there’s also the Webmaster Central blog and the Google Webmaster Help discussion forum. On my wishlist of tools to add to Webmaster Central is the ability to see which of your own site’s pages appear in the Supplemental Index. Let’s hope that Google considers my suggestion.

In the meantime, go sign up for Google Webmaster Central and verify your site. You’ll be glad you did.