Complete Tutorial of SEO

SEO Advice & Marketing Tips for the Music Industry

2012-04-25T14:40:00.000-07:00

Music is one of the most popular forms of entertainment and one of the most traded digital assets on the planet. Ever since Napster's debut in 1999 musicians, record labels and the RIAA have all singled out file sharing as the overwhelming source for loss of revenue in record sales. I have always wondered why they get to point all of these crazy fingers without highlighting how absolutely awful they are at marketing their products on the Internet – not to mention how little they seem to care about the revenue they lose to their own horribleness.

Lyrics

A massive volume of searches related to music are for song lyrics. For you kids, back in the old days, records, cassette tapes and CD’s came with lyrics to each song included on the album’s liner notes. So, when you finally scraped together $10-$20 to buy an album, you also got some great artwork and the lyrics to every song. You could confidently sing along to your favorites while in the shower, in your car, or just to annoy your coworkers.
After the explosion of MP3 files, web users turned to the Internet to find lyrics. However, today it is still rare for an artist’s official website to contain any lyrics to any of their own songs. As perplexing as that might sound to the savvy folks reading this, it gets much worse.

^{Fig. 1 - example of a search for lyrics on Google.}
A web user searching for lyrics will find them on one of many websites. Since these websites are not official, they gain revenue and profit from the plethora of advertising with which they surround the lyrics. These ads can often be misleading and take users to websites purporting to give away the song for free, perpetuating the very problem the record industry claims is killing them.

^{Fig. 2 - a lyrics website displays an advertisement for free music downloads above an artist's lyrics}
To highlight this issue I looked at one of my current favorite bands, The Black Keys. The first thing I did was picked out their top three most recognized songs and looked up their exact-match search volume with Google Adwords Keyword tool. To get a better idea of the search volume I looked at three variations of a likely search to find the lyrics for each song: Howling for You, Lonely Boy and Tighten Up. What I found was that, according to Google's tool, each month these variations get 31,960 exact searches.
That's 11,460 more people than the capacity of FC Dallas Stadium in Frisco, Texas, where The Black Keys will be headlining a concert in April. For just three songs and nine search phrases, that comes out to 383,520 searches per year (likely declining the older the song gets), or 1/3 of a million chances to engage fans with concert dates, merchandise and other music.

^{Fig. 3 - exact match searches for the lyrics of "lonely boy", "tighten up" and "howlin for you"}

Music Videos and Music Streaming

I remember reading a news article once that stated just how much an artist had to pay to create a music video and then get it slotted in prime viewing time on MTV. This was, of course, before MTV turned teenagers into pregnant-whining-Snooki impersonators. Music videos allow artist to engage music lovers with a visually appealing representation of their music, which helps spread the word and win record sales, both digital and physical. The videos also help get music fans to part with their cash (and routines) and go out to concerts.
Music labels and artists are terrible at marketing with their videos on the Internet. The DMCA states that web streams, like web radio, are an “interactive service,” and therefore they cannot play music upon a listener’s demand. Think about that. If you went to Shoutcast, picked a station, and requested a song, you would have to wait one hour for it to play. The DMCA also states that you can only play the same song from an album after an hour gap – and no more than three songs from the same artist or box set in a row. This is a chief complaint among internet radio users. These rules came directly from record labels' lobbying efforts concerned that Internet users would simply record the album from an Internet radio station and never buy it.
If you just rolled your eyes, then you are one of the millions of people who go to YouTube and listen to a song by an artist, only to be shown the entire catalog of that artist's works when the video is done playing. You may have even seen official playlists – created by a music label, sometimes! – containing nothing but videos of one artist or album. You can listen to as many songs as you want, on demand, in a row. As long as the label doesn't complain to YouTube, these stay up.
It's the record labels’ way of giving us free music.

^{Fig. 4 - a screen capture of keepvid.com downloading videos and music for free from YouTube}
The most astute web users know they can usually record a music video or find it in their temp files. But it doesn't take a lot of computer know-how to get an MP3, or even the entire HD version of your favorite song, for free from YouTube. Services like Keepvid.com and SnipMP3.com allow access to all of the versions of a video converted on YouTube. Typically that means 240p, 360p and 480p FLV, 480p, 720p, 1080p HD MP4, and 360p, 480p and 720p WebM – and also extracting a standard quality MP3 audio file from the video.
So, to put this in perspective, recording artists and record labels attack online streaming radio stations where a listener is interested in a broad category of music like rock, dub step or hip-hop, but allow and encourage the free downloading of their creative works via YouTube/Vevo where the fan has specific intent on just one artist and/or song.

^{Fig. 5 - shoutcast radio stations and pandora encourage music buying and don't allow music to be downloaded.}
Oh, just wait, record labels get even worse. Just like with lyrics, recording artists are not taking full advantage of the power of their music videos. Most artists, just like The Black Keys, are content to upload their videos to YouTube/Vevo and a few other major websites, letting their music entice people to share it around and these sites promote it. When a web user performs a search for the video, then, they land on YouTube or Vevo – not on the artist’s website. Again, this decreases opportunities to engage fans, who are seeking your content; with tour, merchandise, and music information.

^{Fig. 6 - universal video search appearing at p1 and leaving out the artist's website.}
An artist or label, like The Black Keys, might have a videos page on their website, or even a separate page for each video with correct title tag, search engine friendly URL structure, and some content. However, as you can see in the SERPs image above, The Black Keys’ own website doesn't show up in top rankings for a search for their music video “Lonely Boy.” That’s because a query with ‘video’ (singular only) seems to pull Google’s Universal Video results in at position #1 in a large majority of searches.
The Black Keys website doesn't have a video sitemap or use any markup like Facebook Open Graph or Schema.org to help tell engines and social websites that this is a video page. The result is that, when their site finally shows up in SERPs for a song, it shows up with the main videos page and not the specific page for that song.
Finally, we have the issue of encouraging and utilizing user generated content (UGC) to promote your musical brand. The Black Keys, along with artists like Tech N9ne and Blink 182, do a great job of allowing their fans to create videos using their music. However, we have yet to see UGC utilized in music video production on a large scale. There are multiple types of music videos created by fans to help promote an artist’s music including anime music videos, game music videos, fan animation videos, lyric videos, cover loop videos, sing along videos, etc. Find communities and encourage your fans to create their own versions of your music videos, like this one – a close-up of The Black Keys ‘Lonely Boy’ playing on a vinyl record player.

Your Own Website

The last thing that musicians and labels do that completely drives me insane is mishandling and under-utilizing their own websites. Aside from the issues above – a lack of content that fans want, directing users to other websites, and doing a terrible job of search optimizing their own content – there are several other often repeated problems.
The first is the “song preview.” Back to my Black Keys example, the band published their video on MTV, Vimeo and YouTube (kudos for not just using YouTube). The same video appears embedded from YouTube on their website. It’s full length, however, if you land on their Discography page, you can only listen to a short sample of the song. Really? I am not making this up, go look for yourself.
Even more perplexing is how hard it is to purchase a song or album after sampling it. I can listen, then find the navigation link to the store, then navigate to music, then I can … OK, I can't buy the song. Thanks for the teaser. Even more confusing, Tour pages typically have a link straight to the “buy tickets” page.
Musician websites most often overuse Flash, Quicktime, Silverlight or other proprietary plugins to display content. This limits the ability for users on iPhones, or browsers without plugins installed, to view the content. While this can keep some users from enjoying content, there are other ways that once on a musicians website users can get distracted. The most prominent being the over usage of social media pushing. I get it, you want to engage with users in social media. If I really like you I might follow you on Twitter when I see the follow button, Like you on Facebook, + you on Google+ or hug you on superintenselyfriendlysocialnetwork.com, but when your users are on your website - THEY ARE ALREADY ENGAGING WITH YOU. Your website should engage back.
Finally – you were waiting for finally, I know – artist's websites, including The Black Keys, violate several other SEO best practices like good, flat internal linking structures, publishing sitemaps, and providing descriptive alt and image title tags on all images.

^{Fig. 7 - an example of how alt tags are being used on the artist "the black keys" website.}
Bands, solo artists and record labels – the Internet is what you make of it, and you make it wonderful with your music, but terrible with your SEO and marketing practices. Before you keep blaming mythical huge losses on internet sharing, please fix your own online marketing efforts. You stand to make billions.

The Free Marketing Tips

Lyrics

Put them on your own website.
You can try putting them on your Facebook page.
Surround them with sales info for tours, songs, albums and merchandise.

Music Videos and Music Streaming

Embrace all video platforms, not just one or two.
Promote your music through streaming web radio stations.
Encourage and utilize user generated music videos, unleash the creativity of your fans.
Place videos on your website, using a new page for each song.
Create a video sitemap.

Your Website

Stop using song previews on sales pages when your song is free to listen to on other websites.
Provide ability to purchase or links to purchase location for songs and albums.
Stop overusing Flash, Silverlight and other plugin content display software. Instead make a visually stunning site that all browsers / web users can see and interface with that has text based links and text content.
Publish a sitemap.xml file.
Create a flat internal linking structure with anchor text.
Use correct Title tags on your pages.
Use descriptive alt and title tags on your images.
Don't over push your social networks.

Search quality highlights: 40 changes for February

2012-03-02T13:52:00.000-08:00

This month we have many improvements to celebrate. With 40 changes reported, that marks a new record for our monthly series on search quality. Most of the updates rolled out earlier this month, and a handful are actually rolling out today and tomorrow. We continue to improve many of our systems, including related searches, sitelinks, autocomplete, UI elements, indexing, synonyms, SafeSearch and more. Each individual change is subtle and important, and over time they add up to a radically improved search engine.

Here’s the list for February:

More coverage for related searches. [launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.
Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “Snippy”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. We were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.
Less duplication in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “thanksgiving”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets for expanded sitelinks. Now we generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.
More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. We’ve adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.
More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].
More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.
Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.
Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. [launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.
Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms. [project codename “Suggest”] We have a narrow set of policies for autocomplete for offensive and inappropriate terms. This improvement continues to refine the algorithms we use to implement these policies.
“Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.
Improved detection for SafeSearch in Image Search. [launch codename "Michandro", project codename “SafeSearch”] This change improves our signals for detecting adult content in Image Search, aligning the signals more closely with the signals we use for our other search results.
Interval based history tracking for indexing. [project codename “Intervals”] This improvement changes the signals we use in document tracking algorithms.
Improvements to foreign language synonyms. [launch codename “floating context synonyms”, project codename “Synonyms”] This change applies an improvement we previously launched for English to all other languages. The net impact is that you’ll more often find relevant pages that include synonyms for your query terms.
Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.
More organized search results for Google Korea. [launch codename “smoothieking”, project codename “Sokoban4”] This significant improvement to search in Korea better organizes the search results into sections for news, blogs and homepages.
Fresher images. [launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.
Update to the Google bar. [project codename “Kennedy”] We continue to iterate in our efforts to deliver a beautifully simple experience across Google products, and as part of that this month we made further adjustments to the Google bar. The biggest change is that we’ve replaced the drop-down Google menu in the November redesign with a consistent and expanded set of links running across the top of the page.
Adding three new languages to classifier related to error pages. [launch codename "PNI", project codename "Soft404"] We have signals designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages that return valid text to a browser but the text only contain error messages, such as “Page not found.” It’s rare that a user will be looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them. This change extends a particular classifier to Portuguese, Dutch and Italian.
Improvements to travel-related searches. [launch codename “nesehorn”] We’ve made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for our Flight Search feature with users getting more accurate flight results.
Data refresh for related searches signal. [launch codename “Chicago”, project codename “Related Search”] One of the many signals we look at to generate the “Searches related to” section is the queries users type in succession. If users very often search for [apple] right after [banana], that’s a sign the two might be related. This update refreshes the model we use to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.
International launch of shopping rich snippets. [project codename “rich snippets”] Shopping rich snippets help you more quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. This month we expanded shopping rich snippets globally (they were previously only available in the US, Japan and Germany).
Improvements to Korean spelling. This launch improves spelling corrections when the user performs a Korean query in the wrong keyboard mode (also known as an "IME", or input method editor). Specifically, this change helps users who mistakenly enter Hangul queries in Latin mode or vice-versa.
Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
Web History in 20 new countries. With Web History, you can browse and search over your search history and webpages you've visited. You will also get personalized search results that are more relevant to you, based on what you’ve searched for and which sites you’ve visited in the past. In order to deliver more relevant and personalized search results, we’ve launched Web History in Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Morocco, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Kuwait, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Nigeria, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Azerbaijan, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Moldova, and Ghana. Web History is turned on only for people who have a Google Account and previously enabled Web History.
Improved snippets for video channels. Some search results are links to channels with many different videos, whether on mtv.com, Hulu or YouTube. We’ve had a feature for a while now that displays snippets for these results including direct links to the videos in the channel, and this improvement increases quality and expands coverage of these rich “decorated” snippets. We’ve also made some improvements to our backends used to generate the snippets.
Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.
Improvements to English spell correction. [launch codename “Kamehameha”] This change improves spelling correction quality in English, especially for rare queries, by making one of our scoring functions more accurate.
Improvements to coverage of News Universal. [launch codename “final destination”] We’ve fixed a bug that caused News Universal results not to appear in cases when our testing indicates they’d be very useful.
Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
Better triggering for Turkish weather search feature. [launch codename “hava”] We’ve tuned the signals we use to decide when to present Turkish users with the weather search feature. The result is that we’re able to provide our users with the weather forecast right on the results page with more frequency and accuracy.
Visual refresh to account settings page. We completed a visual refresh of the account settings page, making the page more consistent with the rest of our constantly evolving design.
Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.
Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.
SafeSearch update. We have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.
Spam update. In the process of investigating some potential spam, we found and fixed some weaknesses in our spam protections.
Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

How to Optimize a Company YouTube Channel

2012-02-24T07:17:00.000-08:00

Many brands are finally realising the power of video as a traffic and sales generator, producing video content that both advertises their products/services and informs their customers. YouTube is a natural home for this video content, as it’s not only the 2nd largest search engine in many countries (after Google) but also free and easy to use.

The downside of YouTube’s massive reach is that there are 60 hours of new video uploaded to YouTube every minute, so it’s very easy to get lost in the noise. In order to ensure that your content is amongst the 4 billion videos streamed each day, companies should do everything they can to optimize their corporate presence on the platform. Here are some of the first steps to consider…

Video Content

When producing content for YouTube, you may find (depending on the demographic and viewing device) that most people will prefer to watch short form video content, so aim for videos to be between 3-5 minutes long. If you have a video that is 10+ minutes long, consider splitting it into multiple segments and give each segment a unique title and brief introduction.

If you have a large archive of video content, do not upload it all at once. Instead, drip feed YouTube with a couple of videos each day. This frequency of uploading has been found to really grow channels quickly.

Within any made for YouTube content, Ayima recommends having the presenter/narrator prompt the viewer to Subscribe to the channel, Like the video or Leave a Comment. If you can start to encourage the audience to interact with the YouTube Channel more, your brand will naturally build strong quality score signals.

Uploading

Even if your company has many brands and products, Ayima recommends uploading all of the video content into a single branded YouTube channel. YouTube channels are like domain names in Google’s web ranking algorithms, consolidating domains/channels to a single location boosts authority and rankings across the board. If you already have multiple channels, it may be worth migrating the videos into a single destination.

Make sure that every video has a unique title, that describes the video and includes the keywords you would use if searching for the video.

e.g. “ACME Widgets Video” could become “How to use ACME widgets” or “ACME Widget in-depth review”.

Don’t include your brand name in the title of each video as a branding exercise – if the video isn’t specifically about your company (e.g. History, Recruitment, News etc), having the company name in the title is merely diluting the relevancy of your video for related searches.

When tagging up a video on YouTube, try to keep the number of tags in the 5-10 terms range. Exclude stop words such as “the” and make sure that you really focus on words that give context to what the video is about. Examples of good tags include:
- Place names
- Peoples names
- Brand, product or model names

Tagging helps YouTube form the Related Videos suggestions, so if you tag videos correctly you can find that your brand’s videos now show up at the end of other popular videos in your niche. It’s worth researching what tags similar popular videos have used – as with the title – avoid dilution of relevancy by only using tags that are exact matches.

A lot of the top YouTube channel owners have built their large audience base by treating YouTube as a social network, it’s not just about having great content. Interact with your company’s YouTube audience as you would a Facebook fan or Twitter follower, user engagement should dramatically improve.

Ranking Videos on YouTube / within Google

YouTube videos rank very well within Google’s universal, aka “blended”, search results – often pushing down organic listings that have significant authority and many inbound links. For that reason alone, hosting your videos on the YouTube domain which has such a high authority within Google, has a clear advantage. But like other content, if you want to increase the chances of a video appearing within the organic search results, you need to look at building links to the video within YouTube just as you would a key page on your corporate site. One way of doing this is to conduct a blogger outreach program where you contact relevant blogs and offer them the video to embed on their website. Within the YouTube “Embed” code (linked to under each video) you can also append a link to the root of your channel or to the video itself.

When a video is embedded on a page – the content of that page provides Google with further context of the type of searches that the video should rank for. So embed the videos on your main site where possible.

With the relevancy of the video taken into account, the following factors will help to increase the rankings of each video within YouTube:
- Number of channel subscribers
- Frequency of new video uploads to the Channel
- Ratio of thumbs up / thumbs down for each video
- Video engagement (ratio of thumbs up/down and comments)

Once the channel is set-up and optimized content is starting to drip in, your company should use other social networks to promote the channel and push people to each new video. This means promotion of the channel to your newsletter, previous customers, active clients and followers/fans on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

Five key actions to take away from this…

1. Optimize video titles as you would with webpage titles
2. Increase the uploading frequency of fresh new content (but don’t upload all at once)
3. Embed videos on relevant websites and reach out to bloggers in your space
4. Leverage existing social networks to grow your YouTube Subscriber count
5. Treat YouTube Subscribers as you would Facebook Fans

You can of course buy thumbs up on YouTube in a similar way to buying links, to manipulate YouTube’s ranking factors. It’s a very risky practice unless you know what you are doing and to start with, you’re much better off concentrating on producing more video content and growing the channel organically.

Is PageRank Important?

2012-02-03T07:44:00.000-08:00

Just Enough Knowledge to be Dangerous

One of the bigger problems with learning in the field of SEO is that there are a lot of people who have a nugget of information. And they spread it far and wide without the proper context needed to evaluate the potential risks and rewards of any given strategy. So new SEOs end up thinking topic x is the most important, then topic y, then topic z. And then someone debunks one of those. Many false facts are taken as truths when the people with a nugget of information (that they found from some source) spread it as fact.

Accurate Answers Need Context

As the structure of the web changes and search engine relevancy algorithms change then so must the field of SEO. This means that the right answer to questions can change frequently, and information from many years ago may not be correct. Does PageRank matter? When I first got in SEO it was crucially important, but over the years other pieces of the relevancy algorithms (like domain age, domain name, domain trust, domain extension, link anchor text, searcher location, search query chains, word relationships, search personalization, other user data, result re-ranking based on local inter-connectivity, input from 10,000+ remote quality raters, and even a wide array of penalties & filters) have been layered over the top of the core relevancy algorithm.

If that sounds like a lot, it is because it is!

Yes, PageRank is important to driving indexing, but for rankings it is nowhere near as important as it once was. SEO has become a much more refined art. In an October 2009 interview, Google's Amit Singal stated:

No one should feel, if I dismantle the current search system, someone will get upset. That’s the wrong environment. When I came, I dismantled [Google cofounders] Larry and Sergey’s whole ranking system. That was the whole idea. I just said, That’s how I think it should be done, and Sergey said, Great!

Great SEO Service is Interactive

Search keeps innovating - as it must. Each layer of innovation creates new challenges and new opportunities.

Not only does SEO strategy change over time, but it also varies from site to site. A large corporate site has a different set of strengths and weaknesses than a small local business website. The best SEO advice must incorporate all of the following

where you are
where you want to be
the resources you have to bridge the gap between the above 2 (domain names, brand, social relations, public relations, capital, etc.)
what the competition is doing
your strengths and weaknesses relative to your market

That is why having an interactive SEO Community is so important. It allows us to look for competitive strengths and weaknesses, and offer useful tips that fit your market, your website, and your business.

Even Search Engineers Don't Know All the Search Algorithms

The algorithms are so complex that sometimes even leading search engineers working for Google are uncertain of what is going on. Search engineers can't know every bit of code because Google has made over 450 algorithm changes in a single year.

When I first wrote about a new algorithmic anomaly that I (and others) saw, I got flamed with some pretty nasty words on public SEO sites...a few of which are highlighted below:

The above people were:

confident
rude
wrong

And that is part of the reason I stopped sharing as much research publicly. Sharing publicly meant...

spending long hours of research and writing (for free)
creating more competition for myself (from the people who listen to my tips and advice)
watching my brand get dragged through the mud by people who didn't have the experience or capacity needed to understand and evaluate what I was writing about (but who had enough time to hang out in a free forum and blast me).

Whereas if we share that sort of information in our exclusive member forums we...

help our customers
get to share information and learn from each other's experiences
don't get blasted by the trolls hanging out on the public forums

Google's Matt Cutts Confirmed I Was Right

In early 2008 Google's Matt Cutts (one of the top 4 search engineers working at Google) wrote about the above issue that he did not know existed (even AFTER he was alerted to it).

But take notice that Matt would not confirm the issue until he claimed it had been corrected. So if you wanted to research that issue to better learn the relevancy algorithms it was already gone.

SEO professionals either captured the opportunity early or missed it. And, if they waited for the official word from Google, they missed it.

Algorithmic anomalies & new penalties are often written off by the industry & then months or years later the truth is revealed.

Back to PageRank

So PageRank...is it important? Yes, primarily for

determining the original source of content when duplicates of a page exist
selecting the initial set of results (before re-ranking them based on other factors)
establishing the crawl priority and crawl depth of a site

But when determining which site ranks better than the next, link diversity is typically far more important than raw PageRank. And even though PageRank is supposed to be query independent, Google warps their view of the web graph where necessary to improve relevancy, like when localizing search results:

Q: Anything you’ve focused on more recently than freshness?
A: Localization. We were not local enough in multiple countries, especially in countries where there are multiple languages or in countries whose language is the same as the majority country.
So in Austria, where they speak German, they were getting many more German results because the German Web is bigger, the German linkage is bigger. Or in the U.K., they were getting American results, or in India or New Zealand. So we built a team around it and we have made great strides in localization. And we have had a lot of success internationally.

The above quote shows how they look at far more than PageRank and links when trying to determine relevancy.

3 Common SEO Approaches

There are 3 basic ways to approach search engine optimization

a mechanical strategy, where you try to outsmart the search engines and stay ahead of their relevancy algorithms
a marketing-based approach, where you try to meet ranking criteria by creating the types of content that other people value and making sure you push market it aggressively
a hybrid approach, where you take the easy mechanical wins and study general algorithmic shifts...but are primarily driving your decisions based on fundamental marketing principals

Comparing the 3 Strategies

For most people the first approach is simply too complex, risky, and uncertain to be worth the effort. Not only do the sites get burned to the ground, but it happens over and over again, so it is quite hard to build momentum and a real business that keeps growing. In fact, most of the top "black hat" SEOs have "white hat" sites that help provide stable income in case anything happens to their riskier sites. Some people are great at coming up with clever hacks, but most people would be better off focusing on building their business using more traditional means.

If search engineers have access to the source code and still don't know everything then how can people outside the company know everything? They can't. Which is why we take a hybrid approach to SEO.

The approach we teach is the hybrid approach - a marketing-based strategy with some easy mechanical wins mixed in. Our customers take some of these easy wins to help differentiate their strategy from uninformed competitors, and then use marketing principals to build off of early success.

The Paradox of SEO

In using a marketing based approach you build up many signals of trust and many rankings as a side effect of doing traditional marketing. If people are talking about you and like your products then you are probably going to get some free high-quality links. And this leads us to the paradox of SEO: "the less reliant your site is on Google the more Google will want to rely on your site."

If you want good information to find out what is working and what is not, you can use our site searchto find answers to most common SEO questions, and know you are getting answers from a trust-worthy source. The information we give away is of higher value than what most people sell.

10 Elements of a Perfectly Optimized Page

2012-01-18T12:46:00.000-08:00

One area that search engines have made a number of significant advancements in recent years is in how they evaluate content on a website. So what does a perfectly optimized page look like in 2012? Let’s look at 10 elements.

1. Title tags are still important, but it’s not a good idea to over-optimize them.

2. Descriptions still don’t appear to add much ranking value, but can help encourage clicks.

3. Header tags still need to be relevant.

4. URL still ideally mentions the keywords.

5. Content is now about semantically relevant supporting keywords, not multiple mentions of the keywords. The example chosen is a recipe, because in order to make béarnaise sauce there are specific ingredients that are 100 percent relevant to the eventual outcome. One way of checking what keywords Google might consider as relevant is to do a ‘~keyword’ (or tilde) search. Other ways, let’s be honest, involve nothing more than common sense and knowing your subject.

6. Video and other ‘rich’ content can be useful on a page to increase engagement levels, reduce bounce rates and also to appear alongside results as illustrated.

7. Internal links need to follow the "reasonable surfer" patent. It makes sense in the "perfectly optimized page" example above to link to peppercorn sauce as an alternative to béarnaise.

8. Facebook/Twitter/other login comments are a way of sharing the content on other platforms. The direct SEO benefit may be debatable, but it never hurts to get your content in front of a large amount of people. With Google Search Plus Your World, it could be that adding a Google+ login is more important than anything else.

9. User reviews add regular content to the page, which can also be coded to include microformatting instructions and add extra elements to your listings in search engine result pages (SERPs).

10. Newsfeeds only share content that already exists elsewhere, but they contribute to an overall impression of the page changing on a regular basis.

It’s worth noting that the “perfectly optimized page” above won’t be perfect for all verticals, or for all brands – not everyone has the ability to add customer reviews to their product pages (e.g., insurance comparison sites).

Although there's no one-size-fits-all solution, hopefully the above list will give you some guidance on how to perfect your on-page SEO.

5 Things Bloggers Should Not Do In The First Month Of Blogging

2012-01-10T09:39:00.000-08:00

As a new blogger we are excited about making money online or setting up business that we forget a lot of important things that is required. Here are 5 Things Bloggers Should Not Do during the first month of blogging at least.

Bloggers Should Not Expect Overnight Results

After just weeks into blogging, you find many bloggers quitting their blogs. One of the main reason being the determination and the lack of understanding of how the system works. Its important for you as a new blogger not to expect over night results. Bloggers are frustrated and vexed that their blog is not making any money at all and there are hardly 10 to 20 visitors daily. This is normal, the thing you need to understand is that it takes time for people to know of your blog and your blog to have some authority in the blogosphere. Google knowing bloggers quit often, only send traffic to blogs or websites that are over 3 months older.

Bloggers Should Not Not Ignore Your Readers

Another important aspect that you as a blogger should not ignore is your reader. Often bloggers are found ignoring comments and arguments in the comments section, neglecting to respond to emails and more. This results in very bad brand reputation and those readers would never visit your blog again. Remember to answer your readers comments and respond to emails on time or at least acknowledge them on time.

Bloggers Should Not Scrape Content Off Another Blog

This is been increasing off late, that blogger who are new and not finding ideas to write decide to copy and paste entire posts from other blogs. This is a very bad idea, and you can get banned from Google, or if the content is copyright, then you might even receive a notice from the copyright owner. Research for ideas and write your own content. With tools like copyscape its becoming much easier to find duplicate content on the web.

Bloggers Should Not Feel Lazy To Write Regularly

This is one of the most important aspect to why a blogger or a blog never sees the light of success. Bloggers become lazy to write regularly and lack in consistency. This results in blog being randomly updated with no specific focus. What if your blog was a newspaper delivering content to people all over the world, do you think it would be good to stop writing and stop providing information?

Bloggers Should Not Ignore SEO

SEO one of the most important aspect of any blog or website after content creation. Its not only important to write for your reader, but its also important that you do everything that you can so that search engines can read your content and rank them well. By taking the required SEO efforts you improve the chance of driving visitor from search engines like Google and sure to see the light of success.

All About Anchor Text - Whiteboard Friday

2012-01-09T14:18:00.000-08:00

Welcome to our first Whiteboard Friday of the new year. It's 2012 and we're going to kick it off by examining the intricacies that revolve around anchor text. Although, this may seem like a very basic topic, we are going to cover some lesser known aspects of anchor text that is sure to satisfy even our more advanced SEOs. Enjoy and don't forget to leave your comments below!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Happy New Year. This is the first Whiteboard Friday of 2012, and today we're talking about anchor text, which could seem like a basic topic. But, in fact, there are a lot of intricacies that we should cover. Let's get right to them.

What I have drawn here is a web page, and it says, "I just found this great website on Portuguese cooks. You should check it out." Now, this, this text in blue with the underline, that links somewhere, and that link points to another page. Let's say it's a page over here, a very nice page on Portuguese cooks. It has some pictures on it. I don't know what it's got.

What it's saying to the engines is not only eye this page and this website, I'm voting for this other page over here, and I want to pass over some PageRank and link juice. I want to pass over trust. I want to pass over the domain diversity, whatever the signals, the keyword agnostics signals are, but I also want to say that I particularly like this web page about Portuguese cooks. That's what I think you, search engine, should interpret and take away from it.

Of course, this anchor text with the keyword embedded in it becomes a very strong signal to search engines, and as we all know, this is one of the strongest signals that Google and Bing interpret, Bing maybe even stronger than Google. Because of this, lots of people go down a path of trying to acquire links that say the precise keyword that they want.

Of course, this is a challenge because most natural links on the Web don't generally do this. They will say things like your brand name. They might say something about your site. They might use your personal name, if they're linking to a blog or something. But it's rare, it's uncommon that they might say "Audi 87 engine parts for sale" or "best deals on holiday gifts." These types of anchor texts, the things that people search for, longer phrases, in particular, are very hard to get as natural links, and this is one of the biggest reasons that gray and black hat SEO exist because manipulating the search engines by acquiring lots of links that have these keyword matches pointing to your page can, in fact, do a great job of ranking you up, at least temporarily until the engines catch up and do something bad to you or to the people linking to you.

What I want to cover is some intricacies around this, some details that you may or may not know about anchor text, and those include: Number one, multiple anchors from the same page "do not" provide more value. What I mean by this is if this page said I just found this great website on Portuguese cooks, you should check it out and a bunch of other text, and then it said Portuguese cooks again and linked over to this page, not helpful. It does not add additional value. There is no reason that you should be going, "Oh man, I wish I could get four anchor text match links from this web page." No, that's not going to help you.

Multiple web pages will help you, but if they're from the same domain, that's not nearly as valuable as if they're from different domains. That leads us to the next thing, diversity of anchor text, diversity of the source. The root domain source of the anchor text links provides the strongest benefit, meaning if you can get lots and lots of websites, not just individual web pages but different unique web domains, linking to you saying "Portuguese cooks," chances are good this web page will do very well.

Number three, the fluctuating anchor text. This is something that people talk about all the time. They don't just talk about diversity of the link location across different domains, but they talk about diversity of anchor text itself, meaning, "Oh, I should have one that says Portuguese cooks and one that says Portuguese cooking and one that says cooks from Portugal. I'm going to vary up the anchor text a lot."

I'm a little skeptical about this, not because it's not potentially useful, and it should be a natural thing if you're going out and doing white hat types of link building and inbound marketing. But because the primary reason I think most SEOs do this is so as to not trigger pattern matching problems in the engines, meaning if every website that's linking to me says Portuguese cooks, that's suspicious, highly suspicious. That suspiciousness is the feature that people are trying to prevent.

So, I'm not so sure whether this fluctuation is all that important unless you're doing manipulative types of link building, in which case SEOmoz is not all that helpful for you. So, you're probably not watching this video.

Number four, the first anchor text in the HTML of a page is what Google counts, Bing as well. This was discovered on SEOmoz a couple of years ago. We ran some tests about it. We published the results. There was a lot of skepticism. I think Debra Mastaler from Alliance-Link wrote about it and said, "Hey, Matt Cutts, would you please confirm this?" And he did. He came out and said, "Yeah, that's how we interpret it".

So, basically, here's what's going on. If you see a web page and it says this website is awesome, it features highlights of great Portuguese cooks, now look, these two links are both pointing to the same page. I don't know why my handwriting is so terrible in 2012. I hope that repairs itself soon. That means not that the website is going to get credit for the anchor text website and the anchor text Portuguese cooks, but rather they are going to consider the anchor text website and ignore Portuguese cooks.

It's very frustrating, and something that you should think about when you're doing internal linking and you say, "Oh, yeah, we should optimize this link." If it's already in your menu, if it's already at the top of the page somewhere in a side bar and that's higher up in the HTML code, then that is what the engine is going to count. So, do be aware of that and same goes for anything that you're earning externally. If you've got the optimized anchor text for your website in the footer of the blog post where it talks about the author, Rand Fishkin is the CEO of SEOmoz, an SEO tools company, but I've already link to SEOmoz's home page somewhere in the blog post above, that "SEO tools company," that's not going to help anything. That's going to be discounted by the engines.

Number five, internal anchor text, meaning anchor text that comes from your own site, your own pages, it does help. It helps a tiny bit. You can see a little bit of benefit from that. I wouldn't focus on it too much because tiny is a small amount. That's probably the most obvious statement I've ever made on Whiteboard Friday. But nevertheless, tiny, small amount, therefore don't focus too much energy on this. Link naturally, internally. Link in such a way that people think your site is good, and, yeah, if you can work in your anchor text, great.

External anchor text is where it really helps, meaning websites that are not your own linking to you. That's where you really get value from anchor text, and you do need to worry about this a little bit. There should be some manual efforts, some efforts, whether that's guest posting and blogging, whether that's sponsoring an event, whether that's getting your biography featured or something like that, getting a badge embedded somewhere or a graphic embedded somewhere that links back to you in a certain way, you do need that anchor text link match. So, working on at least a little of that external anchor text is definitely worthwhile.

Number six, if a link uses an image, like this, so check out this awesome site on Portuguese cooks, and then here's a little screen shot of the Portuguese cooks website, and this is linking over. I tried to illustrate that in blue. This does not have any anchor text. It's an image. So what could the anchor text possibly be?

The answer is they use the Alt attribute. The engines use the Alt attribute that becomes the anchor text usually, not always. If there is no Alt attribute, sometimes they'll use something like the surrounding text, and you can sort of see and feel that association. Sometimes, they'll use page titles. Sometimes, they won't use anything, but they'll have weaker signals from those other areas of the page, that kind of thing.

If you are embedding images and you're linking back to yourself or you're getting links from somewhere or you're linking out to someone, you want to help them out, use good Alt attributes that describe the page that you're linking to. This is a great best practice just in general for screen readers and usability reasons. It's also good for search engines.

Then finally, number seven, no surprise, surrounding text can matter as well. Just as in this example where we said, "Hey, Portuguese cooks is mentioned right before the image," the engines may be using surrounding text of an anchor, particularly where the anchor itself doesn't have much value or context.

If something says, "Click here, you'll find some great information about Portuguese cooks," the engines might sort of glance around the page and look at the sentence, parse the paragraph, try and understand, "Hey, what do you think they're talking about here? What seems relevant?" This is one of the reasons why you can see that people who have earned not necessarily great anchor text can rank very well for keywords because it's often talked about. That topic is talked about when their website is talked about, and it becomes a brand association thing. It becomes a contextual association thing. This is a helpful thing to think about if you are earning links and you can't control the anchor text. Maybe, at least, you can get them to mention what you do somewhere near the link.

All right, everyone. I hope this edition of Whiteboard Friday has been helpful. I look forward to discussing more details about anchor text in the comments and hope to see you again all next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

How Google+ Uses SEO to Steal Search from Facebook and Twitter

2012-01-09T14:14:00.000-08:00

Google's Superior SEO Strategy

Notice anything odd about your Google+ profile? Does it rank incredibly well in Google’s search results for your own name?
Colleagues note that their G+ profile now outranks other online identities that they’ve worked for years on. My own Google+ profile, just 5 months old, ranks #2 for my name. It now ranks higher than both my Twitter and Facebook profiles, even though I use those services far more often.
Profiles aren’t the only thing ranking. Individual Google+ posts frequently appear in search results as well.

Ranking for people’s names is one of the Holy Grails of search, like Amazon ranking for every book in print. With 7 billion people in the world, ranking on the first page for even a small portion of these is lucrative territory.
As search and social focus more on the individual, the war over names has begun.
How has Google won so much real estate on their own search pages in such a short period of time? Do they cheat? No, not really - more on this later. Google wins by employing really smart Search Engine Optimization techniques – the same SEO practices available to any online business.
For Facebook especially, this is a sensitive issue. Facebook actively prevents Google from crawling most of its content, allowing big G to access “Fan” pages, but limiting information from regular profiles. Now that Google+ has entered the social game, this policy puts Facebook results at risk of dropping in rankings and losing search real estate.
I often work with websites and startups wanting to build SEO features into their platform. If I were to build a social media service for SEO domination from scratch, I would build it exactly like Google+.
Here's the takeaway: Use SEO to your competitive advantage, no matter your niche.

1. Incentivize Inbound Links

Not long ago, Google started displaying author photos in its search results. In order to display a photo, Google asks authors to add links from their webpages to their Google+ profile. This creates potentially millions of high quality links from the world’s most influential online publishers, all pointing to multiple Google+ profiles.

Twitter and Facebook both benefit from similar links, but never before has a social media service offered such an incentive.
Google's SEO Tactic: Require Authors to Link to their Google+ Profile

2. Internal Linking

One thing noted about Google+ when it was released was just how easy it was to be in lots of circles, or add lots of people to your own. People who struggled on Twitter for years to build up 1000 followers, suddenly found themselves in 2000 or 3000 Google+ circles, seemingly overnight.

Google’s strategy to connect everyone on the planet also makes for good internal linking. Following more than 1000 people may not create a practical social experience, but it creates a great SEO opportunity. The more your content is shared in other people’s streams and profiles, then the more your content is crawled, indexed, and deemed important by search engines.
Google's SEO Tactic: Encourage Large Circles Counts

3. Lots of Indexable Content

My public Google+ profile contains a wealth of information, all visible to search engines, including:

Biographical Information
Full Text of Public Posts
Photos
Links to people who have added me to their circles
Everything I have ever +1’d

Compare that to my Twitter account – limited to 160 characters of biographical information, or my Facebook profile, which reads like an auto-generated pamphlet.
Consider how a search engine sees these pages. Take a look at the source code of any Google+ profile or use a tool SEO-browser (a search robot simulator) to see how many words appear on each profile.

Facebook – 275 Words
Twitter – 491 Words
Google+ – 2621 Words

Google structures content to provide a wealth of information for search engines, to index and serve in search results.
Google's SEO Tactic: Search Engine Friendly Profiles

4. On-Page Optimization

Google+ makes it easy to share posts from others – a feature much like retweeting on Twitter or reblogging on Tumblr. These Google+ posts frequently show up in search results as their own entries.
As the title tag is one of the most important aspects of on-page optimization, Google wisely choose longer, more descriptive title tags. Compare these to the shorter title tags offered by Facebook and Twitter, which often run no longer than three unique words.
Here’s the title tag to 3 different posts, all by Rand Fishkin. Each of these posts is indexed by Google.

Facebook – Yesterday, I…
Twitter – Twitter / @randfish: Running test of Google+’s …
Google+ – Rand Fishkin – Google+ – Shocking how many of the folks featured in this post form…

Which do you think ranks better for a query with “Rand Fishkin” in the search?

Google's SEO Tactic: Descriptive Title Tags

5. User Generated Content

Every post I’ve ever written on Google+ has been public. As a result, every post has been crawled and indexed by Google search. The privacy settings on the profiles are simple, intuitive and encourage openness.
The big green button screams, “Pick me! Pick me!”

Most Twitter posts are public by default, although unless a tweet becomes famous the 140 character limit prevents most tweets from reaching the definition of “rich” content. Facebook, in contrast, only shares posts from fan pages with Google, and not posts from regular profiles.
Google's SEO Tactic: Encourage Public Sharing

6. Show Google+ Author Profiles in Search Results

The first 5 items on this list represent SEO tactics that anyone can use, but in a way #6 belongs to Google alone. By linking to Google+ profiles in search results, they create an advantage that no other social media service can duplicate.
Is Google “cheating” by favoring it’s own property? Some say yes, but on the other hand, is there a more relevant result? To me, it makes more sense to connect my author profile with the website that actually hosts the content, such as my profile on SEOmoz.

This demonstrates the power of rich snippets. Since Google introduced author photos in search results, webmasters have scrambled to get their mug included – the idea being that rich snippets of all kinds increase click-through rates. The question is, are we increasing the CTR of our own website, or Google+?
Google's SEO Tactic: Creative Rich Snippets

What Can You Do?

Except for #6 above, most of these techniques are available to any online business. Google has found a way to create large amounts of search engine friendly content, and do it at scale.
The lack of diversity this creates in Google's search results is troubling to some. Google risks turning into McGoogle, where every result and every page looks the same. With any luck, more companies will adopt strong SEO strategies to raise themselves in search.
Now that the adoption of Google+ has hit 62 million users and growing, expect to see far more Google+ in your search results soon.

Google Panda Update: Say Goodbye to Low-Quality Link Building

2011-12-29T10:23:00.000-08:00

A while back, I wrote about how to get the best high volume links. Fast forward eight months and Google has made two major changes to its algorithm -- first to target spammy/scraper sites, followed by the larger Panda update that targeted "low quality" sites. Plus, Google penalized JCPenney, Forbes, and Overstock.com for "shady" linking practices.

What's it all mean for link builders? Well, it's time we say goodbye to low quality link building altogether.

'But The Competitors Are Doing It' Isn't an Excuse

This may be tough for some link builders to digest, especially if you're coming from a research standpoint and you see that competitors for a particular keyword are dominating because of their thousands upon thousands of pure spam links.

But here are two things you must consider about finding low quality, high volume links in your analysis:

Maybe it isn't the links that got the competitor where they are today. Maybe they are a big enough brand with a good enough reputation to be where they are for that particular keyword.
If the above doesn't apply, then maybe it's just a matter of time before Google cracks down even further, giving no weight to those spammy backlinks.

Because, let's face it. You don't want to be the SEO company behind the next Overstock or JCPenney link building gone wrong story!

How to Determine a Valuable Backlink Opportunity

How can you determine whether a site you're trying to gain a link from is valuable? Here are some "warning" signs as to what Google may have or eventually deem as a low-quality site.

Lots of ads. If the site is covered with five blocks of AdSense, Kontera text links, or other advertising chunks, you might want to steer away from them.
Lack of quality content. If you can get your article approved immediately, chances are this isn't the right article network for your needs. If the article network is approving spun or poorly written content, it will be hard for the algorithm to see your "diamond in the rough." Of course, when a site like Suite101.com, which has one hell of an editorial process, gets dinged, then extreme moderation may not necessarily be a sign of a safe site either (in their case, ads were the more likely issue).
Lots of content, low traffic. A blog with a Google PageRank of 6 probably looks like a great place to spam a comment. But if that blog doesn't have good authority in terms of traffic and social sharing, then it may be put on the list of sites to be de-valued in the future. PageRank didn't save some of the sites in the Panda update, considering there are several sites with PageRank 7 and above (including a PR 9).
Lack of moderation. Kind of goes with the above, except in this case I mean blog comments and directories. If you see a ton of spammy links on a page, you don't want yours to go next to it. Unless you consider it a spammy link, and then more power to you to join the rest of them.

What Should You Be Doing

Where should you focus your energy? Content, of course!

Nine in 10 organizations use blogs, whitepapers, webinars, infographics, and other high quality content to leverage for link building and to attract natural, organic links. Not only can use your content to build links, but you can use it to build leads as well by proving the business knows their stuff when it comes to their industry.

Have You Changed Your Link Building Strategy?

With the recent news, penalties, and algorithm changes, have you begun to change your link building strategies? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Biggest Search Events of 2011 & Predictions for 2012

2011-12-21T08:56:00.000-08:00

Everybody's been talking about search in 2011, but what were the events that helped to shape the search landscape of the year?

We ran a poll on SEOptimise in order to find out. While the biggest search impact of 2011 might not come as much of a surprise, some other events were notable by their absence.

Out of eight possibilities, one ranked as the clear leader, with twice the votes of its nearest rival at the last count. So, without further ado, let’s look back at the most notable search events of 2011.

The Google Panda Update

Google's Panda algorithm change was all about improving the quality of search results.

This has caused lots of problems for SEOs and webmasters, with many sites suffering from huge drops in rankings and subsequent traffic as a result. There’s also been no real quick fix to this and for some sites it’s been such a long way back that they’ve had to change their whole business model in order to react!

SSL Search

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) search allows Google users to encrypt their search queries. Google made this the "default experience" for signed-in users on Google.com in October and, as a consequence, stopped passing query data to analytics software including Google Analytics.

Users began to see "(not provided)" appearing in their Google Analytics data, indicating that the search had been encrypted and the keyword data was therefore not available.

Google have stated that overall this will be a single-digit percentage of keywords that is classed as “(not provided)” – however, from an SEO agency perspective, if you’ve set client targets for increases in non-branded search and are no longer accurately able to measure a full picture of where visits are coming from, they will be some difficulties here. As witnesses by the reaction to this change from the search industry!

Social Signals & Integration

With Twitter and Facebook now well established, LinkedIn covering the business angle, and Google+ still emerging on to the social stage, social signals and integration are impacting our search experience.

Both Facebook and Twitter are now widely integrated into websites, giving companies a 'face' and an easy way to deal with customer feedback, both positive and negative.

LinkedIn perhaps has less of an impact on websites' search rankings, although its highly search-visible profiles offer an easy way for professionals to appear in queries relating to their own name or work experience.

But it's Google+ that holds the potential to change search drastically, providing it can gain enough traction to build a dedicated and regular user base.

The +1 button is already appearing on blogs and websites across the web, and on browser toolbars too, putting search rankings directly in the hands of Google's users for the first time.

Siri

Siri is unarguably impressive. Responding to natural, conversational questions with relevant search results, the voice-activated search function on Apple's iPhone 4S ignited a media furore when it launched.

Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo retired its Site Explorer service in November as part of its partnership with Bing, advising its users to head over to Bing Webmaster Tools instead. Site Explorer actually predated Google Webmaster Tools by about a year, and had become a point of reference for many web marketers.

Yahoo Site Explorer had allowed a glimpse into the performance of competitors' sites, and left a genuine gulf among free online services in those terms.

Google Freshness Algorithm Update

Google's Freshness update affected over a third of search results - roughly 35 percent - and is part of the real-time search trend.

It ensures that search queries relating to time-sensitive events, such as the Olympics, are more likely to yield results about recent or upcoming events than about those held a long time ago.

Between 6 and 10 percent of Google search users were expected to notice a change, with other types of content like news and reviews similarly impacted.

Microsoft-Yahoo Search Alliance

The Microsoft-Yahoo Search Alliance gave Microsoft direct access to some of Yahoo's search technologies as part of a 10-year licensing deal. Ostensibly, the alliance was part of an aim to deliver faster, more relevant results to users of both Yahoo search and Bing, with collaboration in other areas like paid search, too.

However, Google remains dominant, and the combo a distant second. And it seems, unlike with Google, web marketers were able to handle the transition smoothly enough that it had no negative effect on their search performance.

Predictions for 2012

So what might we see in the year ahead? Briefly, here’s what I expect:

Plenty More Privacy/Analytics Headaches

The rollout of SSL search from Google has only just started, with an increase in the number of queries affected widely anticipated. However, if the ICO don’t back down on the cookie directive law, this could only just be the start!

If you can only track users who opt in to allowing cookies this will have an extremely significant impact on how we measure website performance via analytics. So this is definitely the big one to look out for in 2012.

Shifting Facebook Demographics

I expect that this will be the year that teenagers leave Facebook in droves. The kind of growth this platform has seen can’t continue – and young people will be the first out of the door. Not only do they currently have to see their parents’ status updates, their parents can see theirs. No teen wants that.

Marketers are going to have to make a real effort to remain on top of this changing market and make sure they know where the teenagers go.

Unification of SEO and PR… With HR

SEO and PR have gradually become more integrated. Expect this trend to continue in 2012. What could be even more interesting will be larger companies using their employees to aid their marketing.

From Twitter, to Facebook, to YouTube – businesses will increasingly ask their employees to get involved in their online promotion. This could blur the boundaries between professional and social profiles, so firms will need to set out ground rules before using their workforce this way.

Tablets Taking Over

For so long the focus has been on mobile, but companies can’t risk missing the latest boat. Tablets are rapidly becoming the norm; eMarketer is predicting there will be 90 million tablet users by 2014.

This could help unify TV and online marketing. Research agency Sparkler found that 51 percent of all tablet use occurs while the owner is watching TV. It’s a downtime device and so in 2012 businesses need to ensure their marketing strategies take advantage of this.

Google Announces Panda Updates Will Resume “Next Year”

2011-12-20T14:43:00.000-08:00

Google announced via Twitter that Panda Updates have ceased for 2011 and will resume after the New Year. Perhaps this is an early Holiday gift to webmasters that need to cultivate content and links on their existing webpages. The last update came in November and all have been considered “minor” updates, each time affecting less than 1 percent of all searches. It’s important to understand, however, that with over 12 billion searches each month that is still 100,000 effects.
Google first released Panda in February and has released six updates since. These have all been considered minor updates, although the search engine also noted that there are updates to their search algorithms “almost daily”. Now, with the writing on the wall, webmasters have a 1 month warningthat the next update should be effective sometime in January, 2012.

These are my top 3 areas to pay attention to:

Keyword Density: Google has a strict policy when it comes to keyword density ratios thanks to websites that lack quality content and simply publish a bunch of words trying to inflate their rankings. Make sure the keyword density ratio is between 5–8 percent or Google may catch the page in their next update. Read over the content and make changes (if necessary) to lower the density ratio if it falls above 8 percent.
Relevancy of Keywords: In addition to density, pay close attention to the relevancy of the keywords and keyword phrases. Reputable sites including PW Newswire and Forbes have been affected because they rank for keywords that are often abused by unscrupulous websites. Some simple ways of determining this is to keep an eye on the domain authority score and try searching for those specific keywords, carefully observing the type of sites that also rank for them. This will shed light on to the authority of the chosen keywords and keyword phrases.
Fix broken links: Sites known as “link farms” have abused the right to post relevant links on their webpages in abuse of the search algorithm. If there is content on the page and are broken links (pointing to URLs that no longer exist), seek to fix or remove them. While not intending on falsely satisfying the search algorithm, Google may think that is what is happening.
Operating a website and performing regular maintenance are necessary to ensure the page ranks well on Google. This is a clear advantage of hiring an SEO company. With Google’s “1-month warning”, webmasters have some time to perform some maintenance to ensure they are providing authoritative content that returns value to the end-user.

On-Page Optimization Not Dead: Long-Tail Keywords Increase Rankings, Conversions [STUDY]

2011-12-15T14:18:00.000-08:00

On-page optimization for long-tail keywords can result in ranking more than a page higher in search results, compared to half a page optimizing with head terms, according to a study by New York-based SEO & SaaS company Conductor. They also found that long-tail keywords converted 2.5 times better than head terms.

You may remember the uproar from last fall, when SEOMoz purported there was a higher correlation between LDA scores and high rankings than any other factor. Some took this to mean that on-page optimization didn't matter. It’s a topic that still pops up now and again; my on-page optimization isn’t working, I don’t know if it’s worth it... on-page optimization must be dead.

Not so, says Conductor. In their research study The Long Tail of Search, Conductor examined the effects of on-page auditing and optimization for long-tail keywords, versus optimizing for head terms or failing to optimize on-page at all. Not surprisingly, they saw a downward movement of more than two positions for keywords with no on-page optimization.

“Even in 2011 – often at executive prodding – many marketers are still singularly focused on the most searched terms in their industry that are also the most competitive and difficult to move up the search rankings," Conductor CEO Seth Besmertnik told Search Engine Watch. "As our study shows, we think there is huge opportunity in the long tail of search for the savvy search marketer to move up the search rankings more rapidly and convert at a rate that is 2.5 times greater than for head terms.”

Conductor’s research involved thousands of keywords studied over a period of nine months, using the data collection and on-page recommendations of their SEO platform, Searchlight. They first segmented keywords into three groups:

Keywords with shrinking on-page issues (being resolved by SEO).

Keywords with growing on-page issues (not being resolved by SEO).

Keywords with no on-page issues.

On-Page Optimization Crucial for SEO

Optimizing on-page elements for the keywords marketers want to rank for is critical, according to Conductor's research. On-page optimization for keywords identified by Searchlight as having on-page issues consistently resulted in rankings increases, by an average of 11.24 positions.

Websites with identified issues but no on-page optimization saw a two position drop. Keywords with no identified issues saw a less than one position increase.

Long-Tail Keywords Show Greatest Rankings Increases

Recognizing that there are two ways marketers commonly use the word “long-tail,” they looked at query volumes and the number of keywords in a phrase as separate issues and tested twice.

First, they excluded medium-volume keywords for the purpose of this study, focusing on those with either high (head) or low (long-tail) query volumes. In this breakdown, they found that long-tail terms were “significantly” more impacted by on-page optimization, with an 11 position increase, compared to six positions for higher volume, head keywords.

For the second part, they separated keywords according to the number of words in the term; head keywords were one to two word queries, while long-tail terms had three or more words. Again, they found that on-page optimization increased long-term rankings more, but by a smaller margin. With this segmentation, long-tail terms rose an average of six positions and head terms an average of four.

Long-Tail Terms Convert 2.5 Times More

The final part of their study looked at conversion rates, examining more than 7 million visits to three major retailers. Long-tail terms – those with three words or more – converted two and a half times more than head terms. Conductor said this is a great opportunity for marketers who may be disproportionately focusing on higher volume, one- to two-word search terms.

On-page optimization is one of many strategies SEOs and marketers can use to increase rankings and conversions. It’s also just good practice to make sure your page addresses the issues that brought visitors to the site in the first place.

How to use Twitter as a lead generation tool

2011-12-15T14:17:00.000-08:00

Twitter is among the top three social networking sites today and offers a micro-blogging service that lets its users send, receive and share messages via tweets. Tweets are text messages confined to 140 characters and can include links. Twitter users currently Tweet over 110M Tweets/day, at the time of writing this article. With traffic like that, who can ignore the gold mine that is Twitter?

Twitter – no shortage of business opportunities

It is only natural for internet marketers to leverage Twitter as a lead generation tool. The beauty of Twitter is that it allows easy conversation and for someone who is looking for business opportunities. Obviously, you would not try and sell directly to anyone with the prefix “@”. Keeping your eyes open and being alert to what is going on certainly helps. For example, someone might be looking for a specific service, and if you have the solution, you could probably suggest it to them and end up making a profit.

The short cut to generating leads on Twitter

However, it is hardly practical to browse Twitter all day trying to find leads. Here is where we make use of third party tools to shorten the distance between you and the prospects. Let us take a quick look at what you can leverage:

Twitter advanced search

If you use Twitter, you are probably aware of the basic search function. This lets you save a tremendous amount of time while you run searches using your name, or your business’s name, your brands, your competition and other tags. This will help keep track of your online business reputation as you look at the response to your tweets.
However, the advanced search function is what you should really take advantage of because it lets you run a search for your keywords by geographical location. So, if you live in Jacksonville, KY, and run an advanced search for who is in Jacksonville, KY, you can see who is saying what in that area. You are looking at real-time data you can filter and develop into business opportunities.
When you look at the advanced search form, you will realize that it is quite simple to run a search around a prospective lead that you might have identified. You can also use Twitter’s “search operators” and use the examples to come up with your own searches. Let us say you want to find out who wants your services in Lawrenceville, GA, you would create a search based on those terms or search operators.

Being responsive is the key

Twitter is full of people who post questions, opinions, requirements and just about anything and it is up to the marketer to utilize these tweets. If someone is looking for something, they would be pleased to have someone respond to their need, to identify, filter and respond to people asking questions or complaining. This becomes even more valuable if it is someone from their area. As a marketer, you can plan and set up a series of tweets that could very well convert into hot leads on a daily basis.
Remember, though, that you must take care to see that people don’t consider you a spammer. Instead, identify your niche and target people in that segment by triggering an interesting conversation and being helpful, eventually generating leads.

Not just leads, but a whole network

When you work on generating business leads from Twitter, bear in mind that you can also build a community around you that could yield business partners for different aspects of your business that you could work with.

RSS feeds can be a boon

Every search that you run will bring up RSS feeds you can subscribe to. You can decide which ones are worthwhile from the comfort of your RSS reader. The RSS function keeps your searches well-organized, helping you respond to the ones you find lucrative and follow-up.

You can also use the RSS function to republish the results from your search. If you happen to be planning an event, you can create a buzz around it by doing this. You can create a #hashtag that is specific to your event, run a search on that tag and get the RSS feed. You can then use Feedburner’s BuzzBoost feature under the Publicize tab of your Feedburner feed to publicise the dynamic feed on your site. It is easy.

If you would rather do this right from your browser, use Tweetdeck to see the real time search results on your desktop.

This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to leveraging Twitter for lead generation. Do you have your own tips to share? Do post them in the comments section.

Conversion Tracking vs. Google Analytics Goals

2011-12-14T12:57:00.000-08:00

Conversion tracking is a must-have. If you can, you should.

Simply knowing how many sales you generated for how much spend isn't enough. You need to be able to know which keywords (and better, which search queries) generated the enquiries, sales, leads and phone calls you're interested in.

This means you need a tool that integrates with AdWords, either by letting you get the data out, or by putting its own data in.

Exporting to a Tool

Getting the data out means tagging your landing pages with query strings. This will mean that a solution on your site can read that query string and know whatever information you've given it.

The big advantage of using these kinds of solutions is the range of them available. They can include attribution modeling and user journey paths and all kinds of exciting information. You can integrate them into CRM systems and log the keyword and user all the way through their lifecycle as a customer. Most of these systems will be able to pull keyword data from query strings you tag, and search query data from referral information, then pair these together in the customer's record if they convert.

The downside is that acting on that information in AdWords is a few steps removed. You need to use multiple different systems to see the data and take actions, such as increasing or decreasing bids based on conversion rate. Convenience and cost are the main disadvantages of these systems.

There are two options that use the opposite approach: put conversion data into AdWords to analyze there. AdWords' own conversion tracking system, and Google Analytics will both do this, and both are free. Let's take a look at how they're different and why you might choose each option.

Importing Into AdWords

Importing the data straight into AdWords has one major advantage over using separate tools: the data you need to optimize from is right next to the areas you need to change in order to optimize. You can view conversion volumes and cost per conversion next to each keyword or ad, and you can make changes appropriately directly in the interface. If you have enough conversion volume you can also take advantage of Google's "conversion optimizer".

AdWords Conversion Tracking

AdWords' system involves a snippet of JavaScript that you place on the confirmation page after the user has taken the action you want to track. The users are completely anonymized: you can see the search query used, the ad seen, and the keyword that triggered the ad; but none of this can be logged to the individual conversion. With a little customization of the code you can include a value to any conversion if appropriate.

There is typically a 30-day window on these conversions. Any visitor who has clicked on one of your Google ads in the 30 days before they converted will be tracked as a converted click in AdWords. The conversion will be displayed at the date and time of the original click. So if visitor A searches and clicks on Monday, then comes back to purchase on Friday, the conversion will register on Friday, showing up in Monday's stats.

AdWords tracks conversions on a last-click wins basis (amongst AdWords clicks only, no other traffic sources are included). So you will find that if a searchers clicks ads from several different keywords before they convert, the credit will only go to the final keyword searched on. This will often lead AdWords to assign a higher weighting to your brand terms than you might expect.

AdWords contains a "Search Funnels" feature to let you see all the AdWords touchpoints before a user converted. You'll be able to see the average time lag of a user from click to conversion, but more helpfully you'll also be able to see the keywords that "assisted" conversions (e.g., were not the last click but were still part of the user's path). These keywords would have received no credit in the main AdWords interface.

Importing Goals From GA

If you have Google Analytics set up with goals recording conversions (or e-commerce tracking), then you can import these into AdWords directly.

Goals imported from GA give you some additional features compared to AdWords tracking, but come with some differences that you'll need to know about.

First, Google Analytics is a last-click-wins system across all traffic sources, apart from direct traffic. That means that if a user goes through an AdWords ad but then comes back another way, GA won't log that as an AdWords conversion. You will expect GA goals to under-track a little compared to AdWords tracking for this reason.

Second, GA records conversions to the date and time of the visit that converted, as opposed to AdWords' method of recording them to the click that generated the conversion. This can be much more different than you think. Even in FMCG it's not unexpected to see click to conversion lags of a few days or weeks. In retail you should expect fewer than 70 percent of people to purchase on the same day as the click, so that's quite a big difference in daily conversions between AdWords (today's conversions being tracked back to whenever they clicked) and GA (today's conversions being recorded today).

Goals imported from Google Analytics can take up to 48 hours to appear in AdWords, so you may not be able to immediately see the effect of your optimizations without going into GA directly.

Why Use One Over the Other?

These differences in behavior may indicate to you which type of conversion tracking is more suitable for you depending on your overall preferences.

If you want any traffic going through AdWords to be classed as an AdWords conversion, AdWords conversion tracking would be the preference.
If you want only last-click AdWords conversions to be tracked, import from Google Analytics.
If you want full attribution modeling, then do your tracking in a third party tool (I'm classing multi-channel funnels in GA as a third party tool here, since the data from there can't be imported directly into AdWords, but must be analyzed separately).

Google Analytics holds one trump card still: engagement goals. GA will let you set a threshold for certain metrics (e.g., pages viewed or time on site) and set any visit that goes over that threshold as a goal. For certain content sites these are really worthwhile. Non-bounce visits could be a great signal to optimize for if you run a site that has no other real tracking options.

You can see that each of these methods offers different benefits and drawbacks, and in some cases different biases in the data you'll see that you need to account for. Those biases can be pretty large, so don't be surprised if different conversion tracking sources don't match, and make sure you understand why each might be tracking something in a slightly different way.

Just adding conversion tracking isn't enough, you need to have thought about which to implement and what that means for you.

Listing Dynamic Web Pages in Search Engines

2011-12-12T11:39:00.000-08:00

Problems With Dynamic Languages

Most search engines do not like to follow java script or spider deeply into dynamic driven websites. Since scripts can create millions and millions of pages on the fly search engines need to ensure some level of quality before they will want to list all the pages.

Session ID's & Cookies

Search engines do not like reading session IDs or cookies. When a search engine is given a session ID they will usually leave the site. If spiders indexed websites that offered the spider a session ID it would frequently cause the spiders to overload the server. Session ID's would also make the site seem many times larger than it is.

General Dynamic Page Listing Tips

Search engines are getting better at listing dynamic web pages. There are a few basic thumb rules to help search engines index your dynamic website.

Build a linking campaign. As you get more inbound links search engine spiders will have more reason to trust the quality of your content and they will spider deeper through your site.
Use short query strings. Most search engines will do well to list dynamic pages if each query string is kept less than 10 digits.
Minimize the number of variables. When possible you want to use three or less different parameters, the fewer the better. If you use long parameter strings and a half dozen parameters it is a fair bet that the site will not get indexed.
If you still have problems you can use a CGI script to take the query string out of your dynamic content or try one of the other dynamic page workarounds listed below.
Other dynamic workarounds: There are multiple ways to list dynamic web pages in search engines. Common techniques are:
- Hard coded text links
- Bare bone pages
- Coldfusion site maps
- Apache Mod Rewrite
- IIS Rewrite Software
- Paid Inclusion

Hard Coded Text Link

To list dynamic web pages in search engines you can capture the entire url in a link like:
<a href="http://www.search-marketing.info/catalog.html?item=widget&color=green&model=6">Green widgets style 6</a>
If you use static links like listed above to reference dynamic pages, search engines will usually be able to index them. Many sites use a site map which captures the most important interior pages.
If you have enough link popularity and link into a couple of your main category pages using static links then search engines will usually be able to index the rest of the site.

Bare Bones Pages

You also can make a bare bones static page for each one you want listed in search engines.
<html>
<head>
<title>Green Widgets style 6</title>
</head>
<body>

</body>
</html>

Coldfusion Site Map

For ColdFusion you can code a site map page using a code similar to the following.
<cfquery name="getPages" datasource="myDatasource">
SELECT *
FROM pages
WHERE status = 1
ORDER BY sortorder
</cfquery>
<cfoutput query="getPages">
<a href="index.cfm?pageID=#getPages.pageID#">#getPages.pageName#</a>
</cfoutput>

Apache Mod Rewrite

For Apache servers there is a way to make dynamic pages seem like static pages called Mod Rewrite. The documentation on MOD Rewrite is located on the Apache website. Apache MOD Rewrite.

IIS Rewrite Software

IIS servers do not have the built in rewrite features like Apache Mod Rewrite. You still can rewrite your URL's on IIS servers using custom built software programs.

Trusted Feed Paid Inclusion

You can pay to use trusted feeds to upload dynamic content to Yahoo! to acquire traffic at a cost per click bases through the Overture Site Match program. I would consider this a last option for many sites since many business models can not support the incremental cost per click charges.

Opinion: 3 Onsite SEO Myths and Facts – What Really Counts?

2011-12-07T14:56:00.000-08:00

Before starting this article I would like to note that I am specifically talking about Google. The information below might not apply to other search engines.

Everybody who is into SEO knows that it is more than just link building and offsite techniques. Sure, links matter the most, but how about your website itself? Onsite optimization might not be the most important part of SEO according to some people but that just depends on the point of view. To me, there have always been some onsite factors that play a significant role in the eyes of Google.

Of course, the most important thing when optimizing a website according to link builders is getting links from website with a high TrustRank and the most important thing according to web designers is the proper coding. Since me and the people I work with focus on SEO as a complete process, we concentrate on everything important.

However, there are some things that just don’t matter as much as others especially when doing onsite SEO. Google changes its algorithm almost every day so a lot of the old onsite techniques that once worked are now useless thanks to the so many spammers exploiting them. So what exactly are the onsite factors that can affect your rankings?

WEBSITE TITLE

The title of your website is one of the most important things when it comes to onsite SEO and better rankings. Here is what people believe to be true and what the truth really is:

Myth

A common mistake that people make when doing onsite optimization is stuff keywords in the title of their website thinking that would help them rank better. Keyword stuffing was a technique that was kind of effective a long time ago until Google found out that the spammers are using it to their advantage. So Google decided to change their algorithm, making a website’s ranking depend more on links and less on onsite factors.

Fact

The title of your website matters a lot and if you don’t want to get a penalty, you need to keep it simply and user-friendly as well as Google-friendly. This is the place where you get to describe your whole website/business in about 10-15 words. I am not saying you should not put keywords in there. Quite the opposite – put your most important keywords in the title but make sure you put them in a way that is not spammy looking instead of just stuffing them and separating them with commas.

Tips

When writing your website title, be creative and don’t repeat anything more than once. For example, if you are selling silver and gold jewelry, writing “Silver jewelry, gold jewelry…” in your title is not a good idea. Instead use the phrase “Silver and gold jewelry”. You should know that Google doesn’t care about the order of the words and you will get credit for each permutation.

URL STRUCTURE

The most obvious thing is the domain name. If your domain name is an exact match for your most competitive keyword – you’re on. However, the rest of the URL structure is also a very important onsite factor and many people are still doing it all wrong.

Myth

Again, a very common myth is that stuffing as many keywords as possible in the name of each page will work.

Fact

A website with a better URL structure has an advantage over a website with dynamic URLs. Although dynamic URLs can be read by Google, they simply don’t have the same effect as properly structured ones.

Tips

When taking care of your URL structure, the most important thing is to name each page of your website with the most relevant keyword. Creating many pages with different names that are also your keywords will pay off better than having dynamic URLs.

AGE

The age of a website is another factor that plays a big role when it comes to its rankings but not in a way that some people think.

Myth

A lot of people believe that a website will get better rankings with time on its own. So their strategy is to just sit there and wait because they believe that a website that is 3 years old should automatically rank better than a website that is 4 months old no matter what. They believe that if no offsite optimization has been done to the old website it will still have better ranking than a new website with a lot of backlinks for example.

Fact

The age of a website does matter to Google. However your website will not rank high just because it’s old. The only thing that is affected by the site age is the amount of TrustRank it gets from the links pointing to it. The first two months, you will most likely not rank at all in Google because you will be in the “sandbox” where all new websites go. Then you will start receiving a bigger percentage of TrustRank as your website gets older. 4 years after the creation of your website, you will start receiving 100% of the TrustRank that the links pointing to your website pass.

Tips

Just because your website will be in the sandbox for the first two months, doesn’t mean you should sit and wait for the time to pass and then start building links. Instead, use the time to get some links and enjoy the credit Google will give you for them when the trial period is over.

Conclusion

These are 3 of the most important onsite SEO factors you should focus on, but I want to touch on two other factors people still think matter, the XML sitemap and the coding. Just to be clear – this article is about which onsite factors help you get better rankings and not about what makes Google’s job easier. Of course the XML sitemap is a really great thing and it sure helps Google crawl your website faster and therefore index it faster. However your sitemap has nothing to do with your rankings at all nor does the coding of your website.

Concentrate on what is really important and don’t worry about things web designers and other charlatans tell you in order to get more money from you.

Google Algorithm Updates: The Latest Things To Consider

2011-12-05T09:29:00.000-08:00

Google algorithm "transparency" continues

Google has been making a big deal about wanting to be more transparent about its search algorithm lately (without revealing the secret sauce too much of course). And so far, I have to say they're making good on that promise fairly well.

Is Google being transparent enough for your liking?

We've seen plenty of algorithmic announcements made from the company over the course of the year. In November, they discussed ten recent changes they had made. Here's a recap of those:

Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.
Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page's title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page's content.
Length-based auto complete predictions in Russian: This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. We will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already our practice in English.

Extending application rich snippets: We recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often.
Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.
Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we've made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.
Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.
Improvements to date-restricted queries: We changed how we handle result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.
Prediction fix for IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.

Debunking Common SEO Misconceptions and Myths

2011-12-02T09:17:00.000-08:00

Search Engine Optimization, can provide the best ROI for your internet marketing budget. Because it is widely misunderstood and just as commonly misused and abused, there are plenty of misconceptions about SEO that can derail your marketing efforts.

Here are some commonly held beliefs that need some clarification:

“I don’t need on site SEO, just 100 more links”

There is just too much misinformation about SEO out there for you to assume your on site optimization has been done right. Many times we will have a new client tell us it is all taken care of, then we discover their pages are keyword stuffed, title tags are too long or duplicated, no meta descriptions exist, all the internal links say “click here”, content is duplicated elsewhere in the site or stolen from another site, or pages are cloaked or hidden in an attempt to trick the search engines.

Another variation of this is the idea that some webmasters have that on site optimization is not necessary and all you need is lots and lots of backlinks. You have figured out how many links your competitor has, and it is only a matter of getting more than them, right? Nope – if it was that easy, anybody with some time could make a totally crappy site rank #1 for everything and nobody would ever use search engines.

While inbound links to your site are one of the most important things that will help your website rank better, quality is becoming increasingly important to Google, links are becoming less important and social signals (Likes, +1′s, Tweets, etc) are becoming more important. Make sure you are creating good quality content, your site is well optimized, and make it easy for readers to like your site.

“My web designer already optimized my website”

Web designers and developers often don’t know or don’t care what is important to search engines. If the site looks good and all the buttons work, then it is all good as far as they are concerned. There are many web designers who know SEO, but they are kind of rare. Unfortunately, most web design classes teach the software and visual design skills, but don’t bother with optimization best practices. I recently had a web design instructor tell me that he doesn’t teach SEO because it “has nothing to do with web development and it doesn’t work”! Um, yeah. Right. Think about that when you hire a web designer who just finished school.

Here are some things that are so basic to search engine optimization that you just can’t call a site optimized if they have not been dealt with properly. These things really should not even be considered as separate from web design since they should be part of any web developer’s best practices when building a website.

Link Wheel – Powerful & Effective Concept for Natural Link Building

2011-11-29T11:35:00.000-08:00

With the Internet era touching new heights, drawing quality traffic towards a blog or website has become absolutely necessary to increase its net worth. One of the best ways to soar high in search results is to build natural links that Google will simply love. Link wheel is an outstanding link building strategy that imitates the natural Internet pattern making use of the power of multiplication to get links from your related niche. Link wheels have the ability to boost up your link count significantly over a period of time.

Link wheel creation involves interlinking different websites to the central focal point that is your parent website. The entire link wheel process builds links that go from your parent website to various sites having web 2.0 properties. By submitting unique and appealing content in these web 2.0 property websites, you can get at least two backlinks to your parent website. Google highly values such links as the content on these web 2.0 sites is qualitative and is related to your specific niche. This makes your website a dominant feature, which you can use to boost up your search engine rankings, and thus make your website reach far and wide.

Key Features of Link Wheel Creation Process

Our link building strategy makes use of only high quality, relevant websites.
We submit content to websites and web 2.0 platforms with page rank 4 to 9.
Content is submitted only after client’s approval.
The client can choose the target URL to either promote his home page and/or any of the inner pages.
We offer cost-effective link building packages that are unmatched in the industry.

By combining the effective link building technique of link wheel in our other link building packages, we can produce phenomenal results for you.

10 Recent Google Algorithm Changes To Be Aware Of

2011-11-29T11:29:00.000-08:00

Google makes around 500 changes to their algorithm every year to make the search easy and to provide updated results to the users. Anytime there is a change in the Google Algorithm, it becomes news. There have been some recent changes to Google, but there is no need to guess these changes as Google has released the details of the changes and how these changes impact the search results and rankings of the websites in SERP.

Here is the brief of the recent Google Algorithm changes:

1) For queries in language for which limited content is available, Google will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. For webmasters, it will be beneficial as they can now search new markets, which couldn’t be done previously due to language boundaries.

2) The snippets on the search result page now show more page content and less header/menu content. It points out that Google is starting to put more attention to the text in “Actual Page Content” than headers and menu content. For webmasters, they need to ensure that they are presenting right content on the right page.

3) Google found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so these will be given less emphasis. For webmasters, they need to understand that site wide linking (in headers, footers and blog rolls) will not lead to any better ranking.

4) An Autocomplete prediction in Russian has been improved. Now, Google will not do predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already practiced in English. This is good news for Russian users but not useful for English users.

5) Users searching for software applications will see more rich snippets including cost and user reviews, within their search results. For webmasters, it would be useful to add descriptive rich snippets for software applications in order to get a higher ranking.

6) Google retired a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web. This tweak is aimed to improve image search function. But maybe Google is trying to decrease the link juice from sites like Flicker, Dailymotion, etc.

7) Google made a significant change on how to rank the fresh content. This change impacted around 6-10% of the search results and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query. This change would highly benefit the news websites. For webmasters, they need to update the content on regular basis in order to rank high in Google.

8) Google will tend to rank official websites even higher on Google’s result page. And this change is intended to provide the users with more relevant and authoritative results. Basically, this is good news for long-established brands. The official sites will get better rankings and the industry giants get a stronger hold on search results too!

9) Date-restricted queries have been improved to ensure that users get the most relevant results for that specific date range. It means if your company’s news is in Google News then expect it to be given more prominence now during the time the news is still relevant.

10) Autocomplete predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic have been improved. There is nothing specific about it; just the user experience for non-English speaking users will get better.

For website owners and webmasters, they need to work accordingly to get their websites rank high in search engines. Focus more on the content part of the website as it is given more importance and try to use the variations of anchor texts for linking.

How to Improve your Google Ranking : Myths and Reality

2011-10-11T10:39:00.000-07:00

An SEO Checklist for New Sites

2011-09-23T09:03:00.000-07:00

Over 160,000 new top-level domains were registered yesterday. 160,000! This huge volume of new sites being birthed wasn't unique to yesterday; this happens every day (you can check out today's progress at DailyChanges.com. The sites that start out pre-optimized and that continue optimizing immediately after publishing will be at an incredible advantage over those that were made without SEO in place from the get-go. Of course, there's a lot of work to be done for a new site, and it can be hard to remember everything and prioritize work. This week, per PRO member request, Rand presents an SEO checklist that SEOs can use when optimizing new sites.Have any boxes of your own to add to the checklist? Let us know in the comments below!

Video Transcription

Hi everyone. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I have a special request from one of our users to talk about an SEO checklist for new sites that aren't ranking yet. I've created a new website. I want to make sure I am doing all the right things in the right order, that I have got everything set up, and my website is not yet ranking. What are the things that I should be doing and maybe some things that I should not be doing? So, I wanted to create a brief checklist with this Whiteboard Friday, and if we find this useful, maybe we will expand it and do even more stuff with it in the future.

So, let's run through. You have a new site that you've just launched. You are setting things up for success. What do you need to worry about?

First off, accessibility. What I mean by this is users and search engines both need to be able to reach all of the pages, all the content that you've created on your website in easy ways, and you need to make sure you don't have any dumb mistakes that can harm your SEO. These are things like 404s and 500 errors and 302s instead of 301s, duplicate content, missing title tags, thin content where there is not much material on the page for the search engines to grab on to and maybe for users as well. Two tools that are great for this, first off, Google Webmaster Tools, which is completely free. You can register at Google.com/webmasters. The SEOmoz Crawl through the SEOmoz Pro Web App, also very useful when you are looking at a new site. We built a bunch of features in there that we wish Google Webmaster Tools kept track of, but they don't, and so some of those features are included in the SEOmoz Crawl, including things like 302s for example and some thin content stuff. That can be quite helpful.

Next up, keyword targeting. This makes some sense. You have to choose the right keywords to target. What I want to have is if gobbledyzook - probably an awful word for anyone to be targeting, no search volume, just bad choice in general - but we want to be looking at, do these have good search volume? Are some users actually searching for them? You might not be able to target high value terms because you are also looking for low difficulty when you are first launching a site. You don't want to necessarily shoot for the moon. Maybe you do on your home page or some branded page, some product page, but for the things that you know you want to target and you want to work on early short term, maybe some content that you've got, some feature pages for the product or service you are offering, and you think to yourself, I am not going to be able to target gobbledly, which is really tough, but maybe gobbledyzook. That will be easier. So, you can look at search volume, the relevance to the website, please by all means make sure that you have something that is relevant that is actually pulling in searches you care about, and low difficulty. If you have that taken care of, you have your keyword targeting.

Content quality and value. If you have a bunch of users coming to this page and they're thinking to themselves, this doesn't really answer my query, or yeah, maybe this answers one portion of it, but I wish there was more detail here, more video, more images, maybe a nice graphic that explains some things, a data set, some references to where they got this information. Not just a bunch of blocks of text. Maybe I am looking for something that describes a process, something that explains it fully. If you can do that, if you can build something remarkable, where all of these people change from "Huh, huh, what's this?" To, oh, you know what, instead it's "I am happy." "I also am happy." "This page makes me do happy. Yea, I am going to stick my tongue out." If you can get that level of enjoyment and satisfaction from your users with the quality of the content that you produce, you're going to do much better in the search engines. Search engines have some sophisticated algorithms that look at true quality and value. You can see Google has gotten so much better about putting really good stuff in results, even sometimes when it doesn't have a lot of links or it is not doing hardcore keyword targeting, when it is great stuff, they are doing a good job of ranking it.

Next up, design quality, user experience, and usability. This is tough. Unless you have a professional designer or you have a professional design background, you almost certainly need to hire someone or go with a very simple, basic design that is very user friendly that you know when you survey your friends, survey people in your industry, survey people in your company, survey people in your ecosystem, that they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, this looks really good. I am really happy with the design. Maybe I am only giving it a six out ten in terms of beauty, but an eight out of ten in terms of usability. I understand the content on this site. It is easy for me to find things and they flow. There is really no point in ranking unless you are nailing these two, because you are not going to get many more customers. People are just going to be frustrated by the website. There are a few tools you can use on the Web to test these out. Five Second Test, Feedback Army, Silverback App, all of these are potentially useful for checking the usability user experience of the site.

Social account setup. Because social and SEO are coming together like never before, Google is showing plus ones and things that people share by default in the search engine rankings. Bing is showing all the stuff that has been shared on Facebook, and they are putting it above the rest of the content. It really, really pays to be in social, and social signals help search engines better rank things as well as having a nice second order effect on user and usage data, on branding, on the impact of people seeing those sites through social sharing and potentially linking to them. So social account setup, at the very least, you probably want to have these four: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Google+ is only about 25 million, but it is growing very fast. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook are all over 150 million users right now. I think Twitter is at 200 million. Facebook is at 750 million. So at least have your pages set up for those. Make sure the account experience is the same across them, using the same photos, same branding, same description, so people get a good sense when they see you in the social world. You probably want to start setting something up to be monitoring and tracking these. You might want to sign up for something like a Bitly. I used to really recommend PostRank, but unfortunately they don't track Facebook, since Google bought them, anymore. So it is a little more frustrating. The SEOmoz Web App will start to track these for you pretty soon. Once you've got those social accounts set up, you can feel good about sharing the content that you are producing through those social accounts, finding connections, building up in that world, and spending the appropriate amount of time there depending on the value you are feeling back from that.

Next up, link building. This is where I know a lot of people get sort of off to the wrong start, and it is incredibly hard to recover. I actually just got an email in my inbox before we started doing Whiteboard Friday from someone who had started a new website and he is like, "I got these 300 links, and now I am not ranking anymore. I was doing great last week. For the first six weeks after I launched, I was ranking great." I sort of did just a quick look at the back links, and I went, "Oh, oh no." I think this person really went down the route of I am going to get a bunch of low quality, easy to acquire links, and for a new site in particular, it is so dangerous, because Google is just really on top of throwing people out of the index or penalizing them very heavily when their link profile looks really scummy. When you don't have any trustworthy quality signals to boost you up, that's when low quality links can hurt the most.

So, good things to do. Start with your business contacts and your customers. They are great places to get links from. Your customers are willing to link to you. Awesome. Get them to link to you. If the contacts that you have in the business world are willing to say, hey, my friend Rand just launched a new website, boom, that's a great way of doing it. All your email contacts, your LinkedIn contacts, the people that you know personally and professionally, if you can ask them, hey, would you support me by throwing a link to me on your About page or your blog roll or your list of customers or your list of vendors, whatever it is.

Guest posts and content. This is a great way to do good content positive content production and earning links back for that. Finding trustworthy sites that have lots of RSS subscribers and are well renowned and can give you visibility in front of your audience and give you a nice link back if you can contribute positively to those. I also like high quality resource lists. So, this would be things like the Better Business Bureau maybe, that sort of falls a little in the directory world, but something like a CrunchBase. If you are a startup in the technology world, you definitely need to have a CrunchBase listing. You might want to be on some Wikipedia lists. Granted those are no-follow, but that's still okay. That is probably a good place to get some visibility. There might be industry specific lists that are like these are heavy machine production facilities in the United States. Great, okay, I should be on that list. That's what I do. News media and blogs. Getting the press to cover you. Getting blogs in your sphere to cover you. Finding those, emailing the editors, letting them know that you are launching this new website, that's a great time to say, "Hey this business is transforming. We're launching a new site. We're changing our branding," whatever it is. That is sort of a press worthy message and you can get someone to look at you. Review sites, review blogs are great for this too. They'll sort of say, oh, you've got a new application, you've got a new mobile service, maybe we'll link to you. That could be interesting.

Relevant social industry and app account links. If I contribute something to the Google Chrome store, if I contribute something to the Apple store, if I am contributing something to a design portal or design gallery, all of those kinds of industry stuff and accounts that you can get are likely worth getting your website listed on.

Social media link acquisitions. This is obvious stuff where you spend time on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, Google+ connecting with people and over time building those relationships that will get you the links possibly through one of these other forms or just through the friendliness of them noticing and liking, and enjoying your content. That's what content marketing is all about as well.

These are great ways to start. Very safe ways to do link building. They are not short-term wins. These, almost all of them, require at least some effort, some investment of your time and energy, some creativity, some good content, some authenticity in your marketing versus a lot of the stuff that tempts people very early on. They're like, oh, sweet, you know, I have a new website. I need to get like 500 links as soon as possible, so I am going to try things like reciprocal link pages. I am just going to put up a list of reciprocal link partners, and I am going to contact a bunch of other firms. They'll all link to me and we'll all link to each other. It will be a happy marriage of links. No, it's not. It's not a wonderland.

Low quality directories. You search for SEO friendly directory, if it shows up on that list, chances are . . . even in Google. Google is showing you a bunch of bad stuff. Someone was asking me recently on email, they said, "Hey, I really need some examples of sites that have done manipulative link building." I was like, "Oh, it's so easy. Search for SEO friendly directory and look at who has paid to be listed in those directories." They almost all have spammy manipulative link profiles, and it is funny because you go to those, and I don't know why people don't do this, but try searching for the brand names that come up in those lists. None of them rank for their own brand name. Why is that? Clearly, they are killing themselves with these terrible, terrible links. So, low quality directories, really avoid them.

Article marketing or article spinning, I talked about that a few weeks ago on Whiteboard Friday, also a practice I would strongly recommend you avoid, especially, I know it can work, I know there are people for whom it does work, but especially early on, it can just kill you. It really can get you banned or penalized out of the engines, and you just won't rank anywhere if your link profile starts out spammy. Paid links is another obvious one.

Forums, open forums, spam kind of going across the Web. Oh, here's a guest book that's open and forgot to put no-follow. I am going to leave a link there. Oh, here look, it's a forum that accepts registration, and they forgot to close their no-follow off, anyone can leave a link. Even things like do-follow blogs, do-follow blog comments, man, it's really risky because they are linking to bad places a lot of the time and it is usually manipulative people who have no intent to create something of value for the search engines. They are merely trying to manipulate their rankings. Whenever you have a tactic like that it attracts people who have nasty websites, and then Google looks at those and goes, okay, they're linking to a bunch of nasty sites. Well, I don't want to count those links, or maybe I am even going to penalize some of the people that they are linking to. That really sucks. Then link farms, which is essentially setting up all these different systems of links that point to each other across tons of domains that are completely artificial or link for no human reason, or no discernable human reason, and are merely meant to manipulate the engines.

This type of stuff is very, very dangerous when you are early on. If you have already built up a good collection of these types of links, you are much safer. You do have some risk in those first three, six, nine months after you have launched a new site around doing wrong things on the link building front and getting yourself into a situation where you are penalized. We see a ton of that through SEOmoz Q&A. I get it in email. You see it on the Web all the time. So, be cautious around that.

The Power of CSS

2011-08-05T15:04:00.000-07:00

In this lesson we would like to give you a better idea of CSS and provide more examples of how it can be used for pure, light-coded and effective web design. First, let's define CSS. CSS stands for "cascading style sheets". The World Wide Web Consortium, also referred to as W3C, defines CSS as follows:
"Style sheets describe how documents are presented on screens, in print, or perhaps how they are pronounced [...] By attaching style sheets to structured documents on the Web (e.g. HTML), authors and readers can influence the presentation of documents without sacrificing device-independence or adding new HTML tags."
"Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet mechanism that has been specifically developed to meet the needs of Web designers and users."
(http://www.w3.org/Style/)

How style sheets work?

First, define a style. For instance, you want to define text as deep blue 12px size Verdana font in bold:
Color: #5500DD;
Font-size: 12px;
Font-family: Verdana;
Font-weight: bold;
Next, we give this style a particular custom name (further referred to as "class"):
Mystyle
{
Color: #5500DD;
Font-size: 12px;
Font-family: Verdana;
Font-weight: bold;
}
…or, alternatively, we associate it with a particular HTML tag:
h1
{
Color: #5500DD;
Font-size: 12px;
Font-family: Verdana;
Font-weight: bold;
}
Styles can be declared in the HTML document itself with the help of the <style> tag anywhere in the document. However, it's preferable to keep them out of your page in a separate file with the ".css" extension ("mystyle.css") to further reduce the size of your HTML file. To be able to use the styles declared by that file in your HTML document, you must provide a link to "mystyle.css" within the HEAD area of your html document:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="mystyle.css">
With the link described above in your HEAD area, all HTML tags that have styles defined for them in the "mystyle.css" will yield these styles when shown in browser.

How can CSS help with optimization?

Imagine there's some HTML code used to print a heading on your page:

<strong><font color="#FF0000" size="24px">Main Heading of My Site</font></strong>

Now look how the same effect can be achieved using styles:
<span class="mystyle"> Main Heading of My Site </span>
The HTML code for the CSS tag is half as long as the code without the CSS. This, as you already know, is an advantage with search engine spiders as it can give more weight to your content because of the improved content-to-code ratio.
And even better:
<h1> Main Heading of My Site </h1>

(with a <link rel="stylesheet" href="mystyle.css"> in the HEAD and provided a style is declared for the H1 heading in “mystyle.css”).

CSS rollovers vs. JavaScript rollovers

Rollover menu effects are very popular. However, they commonly require JavaScript implementation. Fortunately, rollovers can be made via CSS that do not require any scripting and are fully readable by the spiders.
CSS lets you avoid using JavaScript and still emulate rollover effects with grace in a small file, but one of the greatest benefits is providing more textual content for spiders to read. Using CSS to dictate rollover effects instead of separate images will give you an effective advantage in the search engine battle, especially if the textual links are your key phrases.

CSS static-text popup effect

Let's create static-text popup purely through the power of CSS. It can be achieved like this:

<a href="http://www.mysite.com/css/">Links<span>Some text here Some text here Some text here </span></a>

As you can see the "popup" text is a span element inside the hyperlink. And one more thing to do is to give the command and prevent the text from showing up when the page loads:

div#links a span {display: none;}

Images can be the element inside the hyperlinks too. Here's one example from the source of this document:

<a href="http:// www.mysite.com /css/">Links<img src="picturename.gif">

To prevent the image from showing up when the page loads, make a command:

div#links a img {height: 0; width: 0; border-width: 0;}

From the other hand we make them visual thanks to the:

div#links a:hover img {position: absolute; top: 190px; left: 55px; height: 50px; width: 50px;}

CSS image popup effect

Any beautiful picture you want to enlarge for the Web page visitors can be processed via CSS popup effect like this:

.thumbnail{
position: relative;
z-index: 0;
}

.thumbnail:hover{
background-color: transparent;
z-index: 50;
}

.thumbnail span{ /*CSS for enlarged image*/
position: absolute;
background-color: lightyellow;
padding: 5px;
left: -1000px;
border: 1px dashed gray;
visibility: hidden;
color: black;
text-decoration: none;
}

.thumbnail span img{ /*CSS for enlarged image*/
border-width: 0;
padding: 2px;
}

.thumbnail:hover span{ /*CSS for enlarged image on hover*/
visibility: visible;
top: 0;
left: 60px; /*position where enlarged image should offset horizontally */

}

</style>

The effect will come in forth when the user moves its mouse over the specified image. You can include this "image popup" code on the HTML page.

CSS button effect instead of JavaScript

3-d button is another CSS creative design issue we'd like to recommend. This captivating effect gives the possibility to hit the button when mouse over it. See the picture below.
Example link
Make it work by help of mouse. To gain the effect you want feel free to use the code below:

a {
display: block;
border: 1px solid;
border-color: #aaa #000 #000 #aaa;
width: 8em;
background: #fc0;
}

a:hover
{
position: relative;
top: 1px;
left: 1px;
border-color: #000 #aaa #aaa #000;
}

Where CSS should be used with caution?

When you code your page using CSS you should always keep in mind that search engines don’t like to index hidden context. Thus, you should avoid using "display:none", "visibility:hidden" or similar definitions to hide sections stuffed with keywords. Such actions are definitely spamming and are not recommended.
Another technique you should avoid is producing the same color text and background with the help of CSS. Such technique is used by the spammers to hide keywords from the human visitors and can hurt your pages.
One more crucial thing – use HTML tags for their intended purpose. E.g., you shouldn’t use CSS to change the function of the tag if you don’t use it. There are classes instead.
The usage of CSS reduces to a minimum the size of the HTML code and provides the best opportunity to effectively use keywords in important HTML heading tags (h1, h2, etc.). But remember – the time when CSS was invisible to search engines has gone by. Today’s engines can easily read cascading style sheets and thus they are aware of what they once were not!

What you should remember from this lesson:

CSS is a perfect means for increasing your content-to-code ratio, lowering HTML file size, and compromising between clean visual design and clean code for spiders.
You should avoid using CSS to visually hide sections stuffed with words or produce the same color text and background.

Code of Ethics

2011-07-29T13:31:00.000-07:00

As you know from the section of the course that discussed the history of search engines and optimization, there was a time when the optimization process was simple and involved little more that tweaking meta tags and repeating keywords within the content of a page. As such, there were a limited number of SEO companies.

Today the industry is highly competitive. Worldwide, there are now thousands of search engine optimization companies. There is also an ever increasing number of websites and many of them are already well optimized, making the competition much worse. In the past, when an SEO company optimized a client's site, most other sites in direct competition were poorly optimized or not optimized at all; the game was easier. But now, almost every competitor of yours is using the services of some SEO to optimize their site.

As you can guess, this makes the game really tough. Also, this leads up to half of the SEO / SEM companies into considering unethical and illegal strategies in order to get their customers to the top of search engine result pages.

Nevertheless, this rarely gives these companies any competitive advantage as most solid and respectable companies seeking SEO services now recognize that guarantees of top-10 rankings sound, at the very least, suspicious.

Let's imagine a company called FakeCompany LTD has a website that offers some products. Except product advertising, this site does not contain any valuable information for visitors so the search engines do not rank it high. So, FakeCompany hires SEO expert Mr. Doe to help them with rankings because Mr. Doe claims he can get any site into the Top-10.

What this SEO expert does is stuff the company pages with irrelevant keywords, creating a link system with thousands of hidden links and then implements some advanced spamming techniques like dynamic page generation and cloaking.

As a result, the rankings of the page are initially boosted. FakeCompany is happy and pays the fee to Mr. Doe.

Still, visitors coming to the site see even more of a mess than before the "optimization" and they are still unable to find any valuable content. Since they find the FakeCompany's site for the irrelevant keywords, that is, not for those they are primarily seeking, the conversion of visitors into customers is very low.

As a result, customers are unsatisfied and FakeCompany receives huge bills for traffic which hasn't been converted and hasn't brought any real profit.

The search engine which allowed for the spammer's site on top of its listings is also unsatisfied since it's losing its popularity among Web surfers because they are serving irrelevant pages. So it invests money into developing a more advanced spider that finally cracks Mr. Doe's tricks and the positions of FakeCompany fall down. Eventually, FakeCompany is excluded from the search engine index entirely because an unsatisfied visitor or a competitor reported to the search engine that FakeCompany is using spam methods.

Of course, FakeCompany is unsatisfied with this situation and sues Mr. Doe to get their money refunded. Mr. Doe is unwilling to cooperate or perhaps even managed to escape before all this mess started. The best case scenario is that FakeCompany gets its money back but is never able to restore its rankings and has to invest in a new website.

Nobody is satisfied in this story, however such things do happen now and again, even in today's more sophisticated SEO environment.

Unfortunately, there's no solution for such cases except abandoning spam techniques entirely and following a Code of Ethics for all Search Engine Optimizers which maintains their good reputation and withstand crowds of unethical SEO companies that wave the banner of illegal yet "effective" promotion strategies.

Adhering to a Code of Ethics (or Code of Conduct), if presented properly, may serve as an effective competitive advantage.

As we believe that such Codes should be unified across the Web, we will not invent our own. Instead, we support the one maintained by a well-known industry expert Bruce Clay and his company. This perfect collection of rules can be found at www.bruceclay.com and we provide a copy here for your reference.

Code of Ethics

“Whereas all parties are working towards presenting relevant and high quality information in an easy to use format to information seekers and, whereas SEO practitioners are being contracted to assist clients in obtaining higher rankings for client pages, we (and those linking to this page) are voluntarily adhering to the below SEO Code of Ethics:

No SEO practitioner will intentionally do harm to a client. This involves the continued use of any technology or procedure (without appropriate care) that is known to result in having the client site removed from search engine indexes or directories or rendered inoperative. Questionable adherence to standards must be addressed via the Robots Exclusion Standard.

No SEO practitioner will intentionally violate any specifically published and enforced rules of search engines or directories. Should rules and guidelines change (as they often do), the SEO practitioner will promptly take action to comply with the changes as they apply to all clients. Where rules and guidelines are unclear, the SEO practitioner will seek clarification and await approval from the appropriate search engine before continuing to utilize potentially harmful technology or procedures.

No SEO practitioner will intentionally mislead, harm or offend a consumer. All individuals utilizing a search engine to visit a site will not be misled by the information presented to or by the search engine or harmed or offended upon arrival at the client site. This includes techniques like "bait and switch" where the client page does not substantially contain and is not clearly associated with the optimized phrase or may be reasonably offensive to targeted visitors.

No SEO practitioner will intentionally violate any laws. This involves the deliberate and continued violation of copyright, trademark, servicemark or laws related to spamming as they may exist at the state, federal or international level.

No SEO practitioner will falsely represent the content of the client site. This includes the practice of presenting different versions of Web pages to different users except where that information is altered solely to meet browser specifications and needs, sensitivity to regional factors such as language or product specific needs. In general, ALL requests for a specific URL should be served identical HTML by the Web server.

No SEO practitioner will falsely represent others work as their own. This includes the taking of work from others in whole or in part and representing this work as their own. The SEO practitioner may not make verbatim copies of the work of others (instead of authoring original work) without the prior consent of the other party.

No SEO practitioner will misrepresent their own abilities, education, training, standards of performance, certifications, trade group affiliations, technical inventory or experiences to others. This includes quantifiable statements related to project timetables, performance history, company resources (staff, equipment and proprietary products) and client lists. Guarantees will be restricted to items over which the SEO practitioner has significant and reasonable control.

No SEO practitioner will participate in a conflict of interest without prior notice to all parties involved. This includes the practice of choosing to emphasize one client over another in competing keywords because there is more personal gain for the practitioner. All clients are treated equally and all will receive equal best effort in their Search Engine Optimization.

No SEO practitioner will set unreasonable client expectations. This includes the practice of accepting more than a reasonable number of clients competing for the same keywords and implying that all will be in the top positions in the search engines. This also includes the implication that results can be obtained in an unreasonable amount of time given the known condition of the search engines, client site and competition.

All SEO practitioners will offer their clients both internal and external dispute resolution procedures. This includes the publishing of address and phone numbers on primary Web pages, the inclusion of third-party dispute resolution links prominently placed within the practitioner’s website and contracts that include sections discussing dispute resolution.

All SEO practitioners will protect the confidentiality and anonymity of their clients with regards to privileged information and items implying testimonial support for the SEO practitioner. All staff of SEO practitioner shall be bound to protect information that is not generally known as it may harm the client. The SEO practitioner will not include the publishing of testimonials and proprietary logos of client lists, press releases and other collateral discussing the client without explicit approvals.”

We try to keep our sites and services compliant with this code and advise that you do the same; however, if you don't wish to use this code, you are welcome to make any custom modifications or invent your own Code, as long as it remains legal, transparent and ethical.

What is Gray-Hat SEO ?

2011-07-27T11:42:00.000-07:00

Search engine guidelines clearly define Black-Hat techniques as spamming techniques. You can recognize and avoid them in your SEO campaigns. However, there are so called Gray-Hat techniques, which are temporarily unknown or not restricted by search engines.
Gray-Hats are different because they try to do things they believe are ill-defined by Google, without first asking permission.
Let's look at SearchSecurity.com's description of this notion: "Gray-Hat describes a cracker (or, if you prefer, hacker) who exploits a security weakness in a computer system or product in order to bring the weakness to the attention of the owners. Unlike a Black-Hat, a Gray-Hat acts without malicious intent. The goal of a Gray-Hat is to improve system and network security. However, by publicizing vulnerability, the Gray-Hat may give other crackers the opportunity to exploit it. This differs from the White-Hat who alerts system owners and vendors of vulnerability without actually exploiting it in public".
Google has clearly defined Gray-Hat SEO as a risky, ill-advised method. Here is the indirect spam definition of Gray-Hat techniques from the top search engine: "It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it.
Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit… If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site… spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts."
Now, having a sufficient number of Gray-Hat definitions, you should clearly understand the danger of any spam or spam-like technique. Gray-Hat techniques should not be used. Never deceive anyone, and avoid such methods at any cost.
Here we'd like to show some examples of Gray-Hat techniques:

Outdated Gray-Hat Techniques

Mild keyword stuffing
The keyword stuffing technique has a deceptive meaning by its origin. Search Engines recommend that site owners write qualitative and relevant contents for visitors but not the ranking mechanism of the engines. The main criterion for using keywords in your copy should be the question: will you apply this technique (add numerous, repetitive keywords) to human visitors only? Gray-Hats prefer to violate this guideline in a mild way. The number of keywords they use in the meaningful areas of the Web pages is close to the limit allowed.
Irrelevant keywords in image ALT tags
This technique means using Alt Tags stuffed by keywords unrelated to the specific image. The only purpose of this fraudulent technique is to attract more traffic to the pages. As you know, any type of keyword stuffing is offensive and violates the search engine's guidelines. They can track the keywords you have chosen and correlate them with the keyword profile of the Web page and the whole site.

Advanced Gray-Hat Techniques

Cloaking
Search engines strictly forbid cloaking for the purpose of optimization. "Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index" – state Google Webmaster guidelines.
A legitimate example of cloaking is to serve different areas of your site for the search engine to see but not the users. A ‘member's only' section can help in this case. Gray-Hat cloaking is mainly unintentional or borders on the harmful usage of different pages.
Unintentional cloaking may occur when you serve different content to dedicated audiences or some other groups. Such techniques are very risky and we recommend you contact each search engine, present your reasoning, and allow them the opportunity to approve.
Black-Hat shadow cloaking starts when site owners manipulate this method intentionally to influence a search engine's ranking algorithm.
Publishing duplicate content We have spent a lot of time teaching people how to write proper, keyword-targeted and valuable texts. Starting from the keyword research stage up to fresh content writing, these works demand special skills or additional costs if you hire a professional copy writer.
Instead of relevant, interesting, and unique contents, hackers manipulate duplicate content using the same few hundred words on every page or copying some one else's.
The Black-Hat technique copies the whole volume of the original text while Gray-Hats prefer to mix and dilute the parts.
Gray-Hats play around with margins to trick the search engines. There is no doubt that fresh, unique content is king, and duplicate content is very, very bad.
There are cases where duplicate content is not only legitimate, but is to be expected. To learn more about legitimate types of duplicate content and how to deal with multiple versions of the same content, refer to the "Duplicate Content Issues" lesson of this training course.
Content mashup Content mashup may be relative to the activity depicted above. Although we deal with the subject of content stealing here, we should mention that content is mashed in a more sophisticated fashion this time. Gray-Hat sites using the content mashup method generate non-unique content from other Web pages.
Irrelevant links As you can guess from the name of this technique, irrelevant links may not correspond to the topic of the website. Search engines regard these kinds of links as legal but won't give you much weight for them. That's why they go grey and don't hurt your reputation so much.
An example of mild spamming is asking links from every one of your clients or offering some other form of collaboration.
Off-topic link exchange If you exchange links with a site other than one that deals with your topic, you'll be bordering on the Black-Hat technique. Whether it is a Gray or Black-Hat exchange will depend on the number of off-topic links involved. Spammers know that several off-topic links may be devalued but not penalized.
Mild artificial link schemes Link schemes have already been defined in the previous Lesson devoted to the Black-Hat SEO techniques. However some kinds of artificial link schemes can be untraceable if mixed with other variety of generating backlinks. For example, links created within a narrow thematic niche may overlap or create Web rings, even without the initial purpose of manipulating search algorithms, so it may be hard for the search engines to discover the real intentions of website owners.
Remember that link schemes created for the sole purpose of manipulating SE algorithms may be considered Gray-Hat or even Black-Hat SEO. Thus, reputation-conscious website owners should think twice before getting engaged in unnatural link building - especially when websites hosted on the same server, or websites linking to bad neighborhoods take part in a link exchange game.
Paid links
Not all paid links violate search engine guidelines. "Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results." - as Google states in their Webmasters/Site owners Help (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736).
Link buying is actually a site owner's responsibility, which is the border technique between the law and punishment, advertising, and manipulative spamming actions. Generally, link buying is a loophole in the search engine's defense.
To follow the White-Hat SEO, purchased links should be closed from the crawlers by using a robots.txt file or adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> tag. Other methods will be punished the day the truth is known. If you ignore this guideline, you'll fall into Gray-Hat and this could play a dramatic role in your PageRank and SE rankings.
Remember to follow the white SEO line in your optimization works. Ranks should be earned honestly, and search engines will give you the opportunity to keep them with your relevant website.
Domain buying
Domain buying is another Gray-Hat technique used to get a quick ranking boost. The main idea here is simple: you buy an active domain name and get the PageRank (or "link juice") that comes with that website as a bonus to it!
Google is aware of this practice as well, and checks the domains for a long time. If your new domain name is really better for the spelling options or brand awareness, you are safe and sound.
However, the search engines can nullify the links of the domain you bought. You should know that if you act legitimately, you will be out of the SE radar. When you start illegal behavior, the search engines will regard you with suspicion.
Illegal Link Baiting
Link baiting is a marketing technique Social Media Marketing entrepreneurs encourage and use widely to promote a site, business, or brand through different social media channels. This idea has diffused and became another promotion option, which helps a business become engaged and interact with existing or potential consumers.
The concept of link baiting is creating content and tools that people want to link their websites to, or creating article content people actually want to publish.
Illegal link baiting starts when promotion becomes deceptive or irrelevant, and links or social bookmarking votes are spread via the group of gaming members using payment as well.
Gray-Hat methods include irrelevant widgets / tools of a viral nature spammers offer as links to off-topic sites. Because Gray-Hat SEO is a risky and ill-advised method, we strongly recommend you avoid any deceptive spam techniques at any cost. Always bear in mind future competitors' spam reports and the search engines' penalties for abusing their guidelines, penalties which can really hurt your rankings and the whole website.
If you still are doubtful about the color of your SEO techniques, read how search engines can adapt to the webmaster's behavior. According to SEOMoz, (http://www.seomoz.org/article/analysis-of-link-spam-alliances-paper) SEs can apply the following methods to track and prevent spam:

"The use of visitor click-through rates and time spent on websites to determine quality.
Advanced text analysis to determine legitimacy and quality of content.
Vision-based analysis of Web page layouts to find commonalities in spam vs. non-spam pages.
Editorial reviews of suspicious sites.
Deflation in rankings of sites with suspected artificial link structures.
Monitoring of rates of change in the speed of link acquisition and loss.
Spam reports by users (and competitors)".

To sum everything up, Gray-Hat methods border Black-Hat techniques and may result in your website being banned. Moreover, these methods constantly lose their effectiveness as the search engines evolve and regularly update their indexing and ranking algorithms.

What you need to remember:

Don’t use Gray-Hat techniques - they are risky and ill-advised SEO methods.
If you go Gray, you will risk being reported to search engines by your competitors.

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