Pear Analytics

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Pear Analytics is a web startup in San Antonio, Texas. We build search engine optimization tools and software to help make SEO accessible to everyone. We also have a handful of enterprise consulting projects, including PEER 1, ServerBeach and Voxeo. (We’re currently not accepting any new consulting projects – but thanks anyway!)

Ryan Kelly

Founder/CEO

Ryan started Pear in 2008 in search of doing some cool work in the analytics and SEO space, an area where he had been dabbling in for five years with other companies. Low and behold, his need to inherently “automate everything” resulted in a neat little website analyzer tool that ultimately landed some seed cash to see where he could take this thing – and voila – Pear is now a software development firm.

Before all of this SEO business, Ryan used to have a real job at a big aerospace company designing and working on jet engines and stuff. Go figure. He even got a patent for his work, but that was just because he got lucky and was in the right place at the right time.

Ryan barely graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1998 where he majored in Mechanical Engineering, and minored in partying and basketball. He should have gone into the NBA at 6 foot-6, but instead decided to trade in the fame and fortune to be a geek and make a whole lot less money.

Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn

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Vid Luther

Partner, Lead Application Developer

Vid leads all application and tool development for Pear. He is an expert with system design and architecture (or so he says), and is responsible for load testing, high availability and security of all applications. Vid has been working on Linux systems since 1995, and has had the opportunity to work on, and design systems for companies like Double Click (acquired by Google), Rackspace, Network Solutions, Merck, and J.P. Morgan. Most recently, he implemented a mock trading game for J.P. Morgan on Facebook.

He loves bringing disparate systems together (not that we have any of those), and loves working with publicly available APIs (and hacking into non-public ones). Vid designed and implemented a unifying interface for Network Solutions, which allows them to manage their internet marketing, by having one interface talk to Yahoo!, MSN AdCenter, and Google. He is not only tech savvy, but also has business acumen, which helps ensure an eye on the bottom line. Vid was born in India, raised in New Delhi, and New Jersey, but moved to Texas in 2002, and has called it home since 2005 – and so that makes him our own Russell Peters.

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Romy Misra

Senior Analyst

Romy is Pear’s senior analyst and mainly ensures that our 20+ algorithms in our tools are working like a well-oiled machine. But in general, Romy just eats a lot of chocolate. We had to get her a timed dispenser, typically used for cat food, to dispense the chocolate to her on the hour, ever hour. Without chocolate, Romy sort of paces around the office aimlessly looking for things to do. She also brilliantly manages our client’s analytics, search engine optimization and shopping cart conversion projects.

Romy has a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M University.

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Alex Ford

Application Developer

Alex is our new developer from North Carolina, having been enticed away from his hometown by the smell of money. We suspect him of being part cyborg, given that he prefers interfacing with computers to people. He writes Perl code almost all day long, pausing infrequently to breathe.  His job is to grab the raw data and gently refine it into digestible morsels for Vid. We suspect that Alex plays video games online in his free time, but it is just as likely that he returns to his monastery hidden in the mountains.

Those ninjitsu classes he’s been taking are really paying off.

Paul Singh

Advisor, Board Member

Paul Singh is an expert in growing early stage startups — backed by some of Silicon Valley’s blue-chip investors (among their investments: Rambus, PayPal, and Google) — and established small businesses in a wide variety of industries. He has over 10 years of experience with a broad range of technologies, demonstrates a capacity for learning and adapting to new tools and languages in short time frames. He’s also like BFF with Dave McClure and some other hot shots in the SFO.

Among Paul’s hands-on experience are his due diligence analysis, business process analysis, process and system design, development, monitoring and ongoing support, automation, preventative maintenance, configuration management, and technology integration. In addition, Paul has a strong emphasis on thorough requirement gathering, technical specifications, documentation, rigorous analytics and analysis methodologies.

Basically, Paul’s job is to keep the CEO on his toes, and make sure our investors still like us.

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Pat Condon

Board Member

Pat Condon is one of the co-founders of Rackspace Managed Hosting (NYSE: RAX) and is an investor and Board Member at Pear Analytics. He was a key player in developing Rackspace’s unique customer service mantra of Fanatical Support ™. Pat was also instrumental in the acquisition of webmail.us in 2007.

Rackspace is now one of the largest hosting companies in the world with 8 data centers in Texas, Virginia and the UK.

Pat earned his BA in Finance from Santa Clara University.

Morris Miller

Board Member

Morris is a co-founder of Rackspace Managed Hosting (NYSE: RAX) and is an investor and Board Member at Pear Analytics. He also acted as co-CEO and co-Chairman at Rackspace where he helped grow the company to more than 30,000 customers and over $500 million in revenue.

Morris is an alumnus of Phillips Exeter Academy, University of Texas at Austin, and the Southern Methodist University School of Law.

2 Comments »Tags: about pear, alex ford, morris miller, pat condon, paul singh, romy misra, ryan kelly, vid luther

We’ve been using the heck out of the annotation feature in Google Analytics, and here’s why: because we can correlate traffic to activity.

For the most part, it’s going to be your marketing activities. But it could be things like you were on vacation from date A to date B, and maybe that’s why your traffic went down. Or maybe your server was down on Friday morning, and that’s why your traffic came to a screeching halt.

I’ve also been annotating when we send emails out to our user base as well, even though MailChimp does a good job of tying into Google Analytics – I’d rather just roll over the note on the graph, rather than have to pinpoint the date range, and then go and look at the Visitor Sources.

To add a note, simply roll over the date you wish to add a note to, and then click the “Create new annotation.” It’s quite simple. Other folks who have access to your account can also add notes, and it will track who said what.  While it does allow you to add multiple notes on a single date, it does not allow you to create a note over a date range.  Bummer.  That would be useful if for instance you did a direct mail drop over a 3 or 4 day period, right?  Maybe they’ll add that later, but for now you just have to hack it by putting a note for “direct mail start” and another note for “direct mail end” or something like that.

Either way, it’s a pretty cool feature, if I do say so myself.

No Comments »Tags: google analytics, google analytics annotation feature

I was browsing through the SEO Expert group on LinkedIn yesterday, and came across this excellent infographic posted by Jim Rudnick of CanuckSEO.com.  The graphic actually is credited to Elliance.com, and shows the steps of the process of how a search engine will determine the original source of the content.  The original source of the graphic can be found here.  You can also read about why Google cares about duplicate content.

No Comments »Tags: duplicate content

Here is a fun link building graph.

The main takeaway from this graph is that you only get value (in the form of links) when you give it (in the form of quality content).

Have fun!

P.S.: Click on the graph to get a better view.

1 Comment »

Keyword relevancy refers to how relevant, or important, certain keywords or phrases are to each page of your website.  Search engines use keyword relevancy to determine what your page is about, and that is in part what they will use to determine what keywords you will rank for when doing a search.

When optimizing your website for keyword relevancy, it is usually best to only target a few keywords on an individual page basis.  That means that your home page should target different words or phrases than an interior product or service page.

If you try to target too many words, the search engine will have a difficult time trying to determine what the page is about.  If you don’t properly target the right words based on the content of the page, you could be missing out on ranking opportunities.

When starting out, try to target words that get lower to moderate search volumes.  There are several tools which you can use for keyword research in finding the proper targets.

When optimizing your pages for keyword relevancy, it is usually not necessary to over-emphasize your company name, or sometimes product names since you can usually rank for those fairly easily.

It is important where the keyword is on the page when optimizing for keyword relevancy.  Here are the places that SiteJuice looks for the word in order to score your keyword based on relevancy:

1. URL
2. H1 tag
3. Meta description
4. Title tag
5. Body content
6. Bold or italicized
7. Alt tags or image filenames

If we find the keywords you are trying to rank for in these areas, you will receive a higher relevancy score, and increase your chances of ranking for the word(s) in a search result.  This is one of the ways we perform what’s called “on-page optimization” in SEO terminology.

No Comments »Tags: keyword relevancy, keyword research, keyword tools

It’s easy to find the pages indexed in Google for your website.  Simply go to the search bar and type the following query:

site:”www.yoursite.com”

In the upper left corner of the results page you should see “About [some number] results”.  You should go through these pages and identify which ones the search engine does not have listed.  This may be due to a duplicate content issue, or due to the fact that the search engine may not see them as important enough.  If you have page missing from the index,p make sure they have pages linking to them, even if they are internal links for now.  You should also make sure none of the pages lead to a 404 error.

The same query should work in most major search engines.

3 Comments »Tags: duplicate content, Google index, pages indexed

You can find SEO tools that show you keyword rankings. Others dial in on social media conversations. Some of them give you more bells and whistles than you know what to do with.

But what you need when your first starting out with your SEO efforts is page analysis. Are your pages technically sound? What keywords do they target? Are you targeting them properly? Does the page load fast, or slow? All of these questions will and can affect your SEO performance. So why not start with a simple page analysis?

By going through each page of your website, you can ensure that each page is properly set up and driving incremental traffic to your site.

What’s incremental traffic?

Incremental traffic refers to the small amounts of traffic a page can generate by targeting long-tail keywords. Every blog post can drive incremental traffic to your site every day. The point is that while it may only attract a handful of visitors each month, multiply that by hundreds, or even thousands of pages. You can see how putting a focus on an individual page matters.

Our blog now has 100 posts and drives over 60% of our 7,000 visitors each month. That means each blog post is generating about 42 visits per month. If we jump up to 250 posts, we would add 6,300 extra visits per month. If we jump up to 1,000 posts (or content pages), we would be potentially adding 37,800 more visitors each month.

Still not sold on page analysis?

If you’re going to put forth the effort in a website, you’re probably interested in conversions too, right? Could be a purchase, an email collected, a form completed – whatever kind of task completion you can think of. If your website is like most, than you’re probably experiencing a conversion rate between 2 and 10 percent. So even if you did nothing to improve your conversion rate, putting more people into the front of the funnel will result in a higher volume of conversions.

Therefore, a website pulling 500 visits per month and a 2% conversion rate will yield 10 leads, or sales per month. Grow your traffic to 5,000 per month, and get 100 leads or sales.

Page analysis is where it starts. After all, SEO is not that hard, and you can do a lot of it yourself!

1 Comment »Tags: page analysis, seo efforts, seo tools

There are several types of inbound links a website can get, each with a different value associated with them.  Here we will explore a few of them:

Contextual

A contextual inbound link is usually a one-way link that appears to be the most natural, and therefore has the most value.  This is a link pointing to you within the body text of another website, and links to you with descriptive text.  This could be a blog post, news article or other.

Sidebar

A sidebar link is one that appears in the sidebar of a page, and is usually replicated through many or every page of the site.  Every modern blog has a sidebar, and is usually filled with links and resources to other sites.  Some of these can provide value such as a descriptive text link, versus an image.

Footer

A footer link is one that appears in every page way down at the bottom of the page.  It usually contains credits to the companies that design, build and host a website.  These are considered to be lower in value than a contextual or sidebar link.

Reciprocal

Reciprocal links are websites that exchange links with each other, usually on a “Links” page or similar.  These have been heavily devalued over the years, as search engines started to see a trend of massive link building with sites that were not at all related.  Some reciprocal links are good if they come from authoritative sources, the content is related, and are not the majority type of links pointing to the site.  Read our other blog post on why reciprocal links are bad.

No Comments »Tags: contextual links, footer links, inbound links, reciprocal links, sidebar links

There is a correlation between Alexa Rank and sites who appear in search results often.  Alexa measures and monitors a site’s popularity based on traffic.  If you are in the top 100,000 sites, you are considered to be a popular, trusted site with a diverse amount of traffic.

Generally speaking, if you are a top rated site with Alexa, you should be doing well with your SEO efforts.  Your site is probably ranking well for competitive terms, you have a steady stream of fresh content, as well as a diverse amount of visitors from all over the world.

There isn’t much you can do to affect your Alexa ranking, except continue to build good content and valuable links.  If you do something very viral, Alexa will show the results pretty quickly, as their rankings change daily.  This means on one viral video posted on your website, you could go from greater than 1 million rank, to within the top 100,000 in one day.

No Comments »Tags: alexa

Writing a good meta description involves a bit of skill.  This is where the “art” part of SEO comes into play.

A meta description should primarily be written for humans, and secondarily for search engines.  The title tag and meta description tag are the two things people will read to decide if they should click on the #1 or the #2, or even the #6 spot.  Even though the #1 listed page may be more relevant according to search engines, if I don’t connect well with the meta description and what it says, I will click on a link further down.

A meta description should be no more than 150 characters, and be a relevant summary of the page itself.  Think of it like what you would say in one tweet about the page.  If you can repeat the description somewhere on the page, that’s good too.

Recently, Google has been creating the meta descriptions for websites automatically if they are missing, or if they simply think they can do a better job.  Either way, you don’t want Google writing your meta descriptions for you, so try to come up with something relevant, and worthy of a click at the same time.

No Comments »Tags: meta description tag