As promised in our last post, "The Rebirth of the Search Engine Optimization Platform, SEO Effect",  this post discusses two new and exciting features of the new SEO Effect keyword tool. 

These two new SEO Key Performance Indicators are:

• Keyword Traffic Share
• Weight average Traffic share

SEO KPI 1: Keyword Traffic Share.

We zeroed in on developing a higher level SEO Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to give you an overview of your SEO performance in one glance.  Therefore, we introduce the metric, Keyword Traffic Share.

This metric solves a lot of SEO issues:

• Keyword Traffic Share represents a legal way to measure search engine visibility without scraping search engine rankings, which is illegal acoording to Google . In Keyword Traffic Share, no scraping is involved.
• This SEO KPI also looks behind the search engine Ranking by looking at the searcher's behavior:  a number one position in Google is worth nothing when it's a poorly written or reading listing that generates no clicks at all. Keyword Traffic Share compares the Real Traffic of your site against the maximum possible traffic.
• Additionally, Keyword Traffic Share eliminates all of the fuzzy "personal search" engine rankings that differ from the normal, regular search engine rankings. About 20% of Google searches where personal till December 4 2009. Google made all 100% of searches personal as they from that date in there post of last week "Personalised Search for everyone". In "personal searches," Google shuffles the rankings of a search result according to the searcher's previous queries.

How Keyword Traffic Share Works

This SEO Key Performance Indicator represents the approximate percentage of visits to your website over the last month in comparison to the total Maximum search volume a number one search engine listing can bring in for a particular keyword. This metric is targeted to your specified country as well as the language settings for all search engines in your country.

Example"traffic share:"

• The exact keyword "car" generated 800 searches last month.
• SEO Effect calculatess that a number one search engine listing for car gets 160 clicks.
• Your website received 80 visits last month on the word car from organic search.
• Your "traffic share" is 50% (80/160)

SEO KPI 2: Weighted Average Traffic Share

Next to traffic share down at the keyword level, SEO Effect also calculates the weighted average traffic share.  This high level SEO KPI is a percentage from zero to 100%. When you have a weighted average traffic share of 100%, all of your optimized keywords have a number one position in all of the search engines in your country.  More importantly, they push maximum traffic to your website. The term, "weighted average" means that keywords with a higher search volume have more weight in this KPI.

Example "weighted average traffic share:"

• The exact keyword "car" has 800 searches last month.
• The exact keyword "boat" has 16,000 searches last month.
• SEO Effect calculates that a number one search engine listing gets 160 clicks for car and 3200 for boat.
• Your website received 80 visits last month on the word car from organic search and 80 from the keyword boat.
• Your search share is 50% for car and 2.5% for boat.
• Your weighted average traffic  share is (80+80)/(160+3200)= 4%

Combining these two KPIs provides you with a unique insight into the performance of your organic search campaign.

Interested in our SEO platform? Sign up to stay tuned!

However, I was still reluctant to begin. Rebuilding an application from scratch is really a challenging task. But at the end of summer 2008, my friend, colleague at Screenborn online marketing, and business partner, Gerard Klein convinced me to redevelop SEO Effect.

We found a brilliant lead-developer who recommended the Symphony framework as our platform.  Using the outstanding mockup software Balsamiq, we spent many hours discussing and designing  how SEO Effect should work. We are presently in version 5 .4 of most screen mockups now.

To give you an idea: The average screen design goes through 10 revisions before committing it to the developers. So, we drafted and evaluated hundreds of mockups. Our documentation on the application's features is (unfortunately :-) 200+ pages and growing. And as for the real work, Leon wrote about 10, 000+ lines of code on top of the excellent framework.

Hans, also my friend, colleague and business partner, then wracked his brains about conceptualizing the branding and communication. This website is the first product of his thorough analysis. He is now adding the finishing touches to the design of the new SEO Effect.

Why a Rebuild?

So much has changed in the SEO world:

• Universal search and search volume data are revealed down to the keyword level, leaving few present day "submit to Google" or indexation issues.
• Nowadays, there are so many new data connection possibilities such as  Google Adwords , Google Analytics , Google webmaster tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer
• Today's development platforms allow rich user features in web applications such as tables sorting, filtering, and drag & drop.

It was clearly time to rejuvenate the old SEO Effect. All of these elements influenced our decision to  start all over again on a brand new platform. That was in the midst of 2008. Today, after more than 1.5 years, 1100 developing hours, 600 Skype hours, 150 gallons of coffee (at least), uncountable chocolate bars and late-night hours later, we are very excited that SEO Effect is almost in beta!

New School SEO: SEO 2.0

We anticipated the release of the new Google Analytics API to combine search data with user behavior on your site. AdWords keyword tools also now reveal interesting data. For example: Search volume data is retrievable per month as well as for the last 12 months. Search volume is the amount of times people search for a certain keyword or Key phrase. This data provides information about the potential traffic you can generate at the keyword level.

That, along with other current changes, gave our development team of the needed inspiration to build a search engine platform for SEO 2.0. We plan to go live with a solid, goal-driven, Keyword Research tool and on-site optimization. Soon after that we will add tools for Link strategy including both "linkbegging" and"linkbaiting" tools.

All tools are integrated via a rock solid workflow and a set of collaborator tools to help you and your team track your data and successfully complete your SEO tasks.

In our next Blog post, we'll discuss two new exciting features of SEO Effect's keyword tool.

Interested? Sign up to stay tuned!

 Read also:

• SEO Effect is Now Open to Email Subscribers
• SEO Effect passes software audit
• Alpha testers are getting busy

SEO Effect has a complete new design anticipating the birth of our brand new application. We are open for subscriptions to our mailing list. Since we launched last month, more than 2000 people have joined.

Wanted: Beta Testers

As part of your email subscription, we invite you to  apply for a beta tester account.

Participants in the private beta test will receive a free, full-year subscription to the new SEO Effect.

"Already subscribed." and also want to test the beta?

We've received several emails from people who want to apply for the private beta but cannot due to the fact that they are "already subscribed."  Although we did not foresee this happening to our subscribers we've taken steps to correct the oversight. If you are already subscribed, you'll soon receive an email with a unique Link inviting you to apply for the beta test.

Interested? Sign up to stay tuned, and possibly become a beta tester. Be among the first to see the new SEO Effect in action.