Google Reading Level - will your readers understand your content ?

You can see from the image where to locate it.  Once selected it will display the reading level for each page in the SERPS results and the overall level for all results. You can check the reading level of your whole site by using the Site Operator. Syntax: [site:www.example.com] and selecting the Reading Level option will bring up the details as shown. Note that you can check the reading level of any section of your site by using [site:mysite.com/folder1] and indeed you can check individual pages.  If a popular landing page or one specifically designed for hard to reach groups has a high bounce rate it is worth checking the reading level to see if things can be improved.

Google explains how the reading levels are arrived at: ” We paid teachers to classify pages for different reading levels, and then took their classifications to build a statistical model. With this model, we can compare the words on any webpage with the words in the model to classify reading levels ” In addition they say ” Roughly speaking, “Basic” is elementary level texts, while “Intermediate” is anything above that level  up to technical and scholarly articles, a la the articles you’d find in Scholar.  “

Social Media spreads the word

1. Direct Referrals: You can be sure that visitors have read and reacted to a post if they click a link in it.  There are many ( too many ?) link shortners which allow you to track how many have clicked on a link in your post. Twitter`s proprietary shortner, t.co, is now fully operational  and automatically works on any links that are included in a Tweet. Bit.ly remains the most popular choice as it can be used to log how many people clicked on links to sites and pages other than your own. You can see visits that have come to your site via shortners in your Google Analytics account. GA >Traffic Sources> Sources > Referrals

2. Better search engine rankings: Social media activity is now clearly affecting search engine rankings. Postings and reaction to them are becoming a more important part of the collection of `signals` that search engines use to determine what content to display for a given search query. Ian Laurie has noticed that Google is now putting more emphasis on Twitter and Facebook account activity. So a Google search for a brand or charity plus a top social media site such as Twitter or Facebook eg `rnib Twitter`, or `breast cancer care Facebook` now produces results which include sitelinks. Normally Google only shows site links for Organic and/or AdWords results for highly regarded sites. Ian`s view is that sitelinks are shown only for those SM accounts that have some unique content. A quick check that I did on a number of charity accounts seems to bear that out. Over at SEOMoz they did some tests to check if social signals drive search engine traffic and they found that they did. However they do suggest that Google +1, which has yet to be widely used by visitors to charity sites, is a big part of it.

3. More Backlinks to your content from authority sites is still the most powerful signal to Google that your content is worth showing. Without backlinks it is almost impossible to rank in Google. To date charities, who normally have well written content, could rely on media and government site to mention and link to their content. But the web is daily becoming a more competitive place so social media is a great way to identify key influencers and get them to link permanently to your content. If you can use SM to build a relationship that leads to a link from an important site or blogger then you will get visits and kudos with Google. So, long after your Tweet or FB post has been forgotten the backlink will still be sending visitors and convincing Google that your content deserves to be shown. Backlinks: the gift that keeps on giving.

Image by inanpw at Flickr http://bit.ly/q9KqTC

Google update effect on UK charity sites

You can read more about the possible impact and how to identify the most affected pages and even keywords by Patrick Altoft. Aaron Wall, who is well worth reading if you want an informed critical view of the search business, reckons that UK sites will be affected. My checks on around 10 decent sized UK charity sites suggest that very few will be affected but better to be safe than sorry….

There is a more complete explanation of how to identify poor performing pages ( slide 6)at fundraising.co.uk bit.ly/d9YvWN.

So what to do: 1. Look at the list of Queries and see if there are any that you would like a page on your site to rank higher for.  If you see a suitable Query with a high number of Impressions take a closer look. If your highest ranked page for that term is below Position 1 or 2,  and consequently getting few Clicks, you should look to optimise that page for this Query. To do that look at on-page factors, particularly the Page Title, then look to get back links, ideally from external sites, with the Query as the anchor text.

2.  Check the snippet which appears in the Google SERPS results for the top terms that you want to be found for.  Does the snippet  ( and the Page Title) accurately describe what you are offering and if so does it encourage visitors to your page ?

Most popular Social Sites

Social Sites such as Facebook and Twitter are now major sources of traffic for many web sites and for some web sites rival Google in their ability to drive traffic.

However for these UK charities the social  networking sites are not big drivers of traffic. The analysis showed that Facebook and Twitter accounted for over 95% of visits from the social sites, although Stumbleupon had some success. While the data says that Twitter brought about 33% of the visits that Facebook brought in reality Twitter probably brought more as many believe that Google Analytics undercounts Twitter visits by a factor of 5 or more.
Social Networking sites have an important role to play in reaching specific audiences but for now it is best to tag each tweet and check the stats for the specific landing page to really measure the impact on visits.

To see how it may affect UK charities I compared the search results for the current Google and `caffeine` using the nifty comparison tool put together by sembience ( nice example of link bait !). For four different sites that attract between 50k and 250k visits per month I looked at their top 10 keywords. From them I excluded the `brand` terms eg organisation name and terms clearly not related to the organisations mission – leaving about 5/6 keywords per organisation. For one organisation `caffeine` put all 5 terms lower than current search results. Two organisations had a majority of terms producing lower results and one had no net loss or gain.

Before it becomes Google`s new search engine no doubt `caffeine` will have a lot of modifications but it is well worth checking your top terms now and seeing if you are on track to lose or gain visitors when it happens.

Webmaster Tools Top Search Queries

Further to the right is the section headed Clickthrough. Here you can see similar data but  now for those who clicked through to your site.  First  look at the search query terms.  Are there any here that you did  not expect ? If you are gettings clicks from a term that you do not rank highly for and want more of that traffic then get working on that. Note that you can select the specific date range and region that you are particularly interested in.

Further down Your Site on the web is the Keywords menu. This shows ” the most common keywords Google found when it crawling your site “. This is great data when planning the next steps for your site.

Keyword Tool Local Global Search

A quick test indicates that the data in Local Search Volume is good but the lack of historic `Local` data is a pity eg a search term may be popular globally each month but here in the UK you will be making a decision based on just one months data. I suspect that for many the reverse would be better ie the current months data for Global with Local showing historic data. Google has not yet explained how this new data relates to the statement further up on the Keyword Tool page that ” Results are tailored to the languages and countries you choose below:” My vote would be for more local data and less world wide.