Step 1: Identify your Keyword

First up, figure out what keyword you want to improve your page’s rank for. For this test, I’m using the phrase “basketball drills”. I just chose this at random and hoped I’d be able to find a good example site in it. See how that worked out below!

Step 2: Identify the Competition

Chances are you already know who this is, but doing a search for your keyword on Google and using the top results is a good start.

Step 3: Find Your Missing Keywords

At this point you should have a good feel for how your page stacks up against the competition.  Now let’s see what words they have that you don’t have, and what words they have in greater frequency than you have.

For the example keyword basketball drills, let’s say that our site is www.basketballteacher.com, which has LDA of roughly 61% and ranks #17 on Google for the phrase. Here’s where we’ll use this new LDA Optimizer tool.

This tool takes your phrase, your URL, and up to 9 competitors’ URLs. It then finds words they use that you don’t, and words that they use more on average than you do, and provides a word cloud showing your opportunities. It can take a couple of minutes to run, so be patient!

To exclude words specific to just a handful of sites, you can specify “Show Keywords Seen on at Least” at the bottom of the form. I used a setting of “4 sites” for my test but got similar results with as many as 8 sites. I recommend playing with this until you’re happy with the results, seeing lots of good words to add but not a lot of extraneous noise.

Step 5: Reviewing Missing/Insufficient Keyword Use

For the sample site, we get this word cloud (on the Wordle link, their clouds are prettier than mine!) for missing words:

So this page related to basketball training is missing words like “rebounding”, “dribble”, “jump”, etc. Lots of opportunities to improve LDA score.  (Note that singular vs. plural isn’t handled well here so some of these words (drill) might exist on the page in other forms that Google would find identical.)

Here are the words the page doesn’t have “enough” of relative to competing sites:

A bit more emphasis on these words might help the site show that it is more topically related to the search phrase.

Step 6 Optimize your LDA Score

The LDA Optimizer tool then provides a suggested set of words and densities to improve the page’s LDA score. Just taking these and pasting them in to your page is unlikely to help, but you should now have some guidance in terms of how many instances of the various words to shoot for as you revise copy.

Adding the suggested words to the site’s existing set moves its LDA from 61% to 86%. So we’ve at least helped our LDA score with a change along these lines. Whether that improves search rank is up to you to test!

Step 7 Check for Higher Google Ranking

Hopefully making changes along these lines will improve your page’s Google ranking, but that’s relatively uncharted territory with regard to LDA today. I’d love to hear your results!

Here’s the optimizer tool.

So I found a great article about converting SVG to PNG with ColdFusion using the Batik Java library. It took a lot of wrangling to finally get it working on the client’s aging ColdFusion 6 server. Here’s a little snippet that essentially caches the converted file and outputs and <img> tag. Works like a champ:

<!— Invoke as <cfmodule template=”/Products/showSVG.cfm” svgFile=”/Assets/SubcategoryGroups/20600.svg” width=”600″> —>
<cfparam name=”attributes.svgFile” type=”string” default=”">
<cfparam name=”attributes.width” type=”string” default=”"> <!— You can specify both width & height, just one, or none. —>
<cfparam name=”attributes.height” type=”string” default=”">
<cfparam name=”attributes.alt” type=”string” default=”">

<cftry>
<cfif attributes.svgFile EQ “”>
<!— Do nothing —>
<cfoutput>No SVG file specified</cfoutput>
<cfelse>
<!— Make sure the source SVG exists: —>
<cfset svgPath = “#attributes.svgFile#” />
<cfset pngPath = replace(“#svgPath#”, “.svg”, “.png”) />
<cfset svgFile = expandPath(svgPath) />
<cfset pngFile = expandPath(pngPath) />

<cfif FileExists(svgFile)>
<!— Figure out the best way to display this svg. —>

<!— For Firefox and friends, we could output the SVG directly. —>

<!— For IE and many other browsers, we convert to a PNG: —>
<cfif NOT FileExists(pngFile)>
<!— PNG doesn’t exist yet.  Generate it: —>
<cfset t = createObject(“java”, “org.apache.batik.transcoder.image.PNGTranscoder”).init() />
<cfset svgURI = createObject(“java”, “java.io.File”).init(svgFile).toURL().toString() />
<cfset input = createObject(“java”, “org.apache.batik.transcoder.TranscoderInput”).init(svgURI) />
<cfset ostream = createObject(“java”, “java.io.FileOutputStream”).init(pngFile) />
<cfset output = createObject(“java”, “org.apache.batik.transcoder.TranscoderOutput”).init(ostream) />
<cfset t.transcode(input, output) />
<cfset ostream.flush() />
<cfset ostream.close() />
</cfif>

<cfoutput>
<!— <embed src=”#svgPath#” width=”613″ height=”343″ type=”image/svg+xml” /> —>
<img src=”#pngPath#” width=”#attributes.width#” height=”#attributes.height#” alt=”#attributes.alt#” />
</cfoutput>
<cfelse>
<!— SVG doesn’t exist. —>
<cfoutput>File #svgPath# not found.</cfoutput>
</cfif>
</cfif>
<cfcatch type=”any”>
<cfoutput>Error outputting SVG #attributes.svgFile#</cfoutput>
</cfcatch>
</cftry>

Great stuff, though they have to jump through some hoops at the end that my Missing Link tool (part of AdWords Evolved) makes much faster and more powerful.

Keeping Your Finger on the Pulse with Analytics

Once you have Analytics set up, go ahead and configure it to email you weekly with stats about site performance. Here’s the easiest way to get started:

1. Log in to Analytics
2. Go to the “Dashboard” view
3. Click the date range at the top right
4. Find last week on the calendar
5. Click the grey half-circle to the left of last week
6. Click the checkbox next to Compare to past
7. Click Apply.

Now what you see is last week’s data (probably empty if you just set up Analytics), compared with the previous week. This is a great start for watching your site. Now, let’s automate Analytics so it will email you this report every Monday:

1. Click the Email link at the top of the report
2. Click the Schedule tab
3. If you want to send it to anyone else, enter their email address in the top box
4. Leave Send to me checked
5. Enter a subject and description, like:
   • Subject: Last week’s traffic for www.mysite.com
   • Description: Here’s last week as compared with the previous week.
6. Select whatever format you like. PDF is a good place to start.
7. For Date Range/Schedule, select weekly
8. Be sure to leave Include date comparison checked, so each email will include the right comparison data
9. Click Schedule

That’s it! Now every week, Analytics will email you a PDF showing how last week compared with the one before that. This is a great reminder to check into what’s going on with your site. We set this up for every site we work on.  If weekly is too much, set it up monthly instead.

(This is a section from AdWords Evolved.  Most of the book is about AdWords, but setting up Analytics correctly is critical to AdWords success, so it’s covered as well.)

and at first I thought it was about McCain/Palin vs. Obama/Biden.  Then I remembered LHC.  Yay, we’re all still here!

Anyhow, it seems to finally be healing, so I’m thrilled about that.  Hoping it’ll be in good shape for Estes Park, CO in August, and maybe D.C. before that.

But I’ll start with a brief intro, so folks know who I am.  I’m Glenn Crocker, a web developer in Overland Park, Kansas.  I’ve got a great wife, 2 great kids, and a bunch of great clients.  I do web technology integration work, which usually means I make weird databases talk to other weird databases, with a web interface in the middle.

But these days, I’m doing more and more “search engine optimization”, trying to get clients’ web sites to rank higher on Google for their target phrases.  It’s fun, and appeals to the puzzle-solving part of my brain.

Hopefully, this blog will include the occasional interesting tid-bit for folks involved with any of the above!

-glenn