It’s been a busy old time in the world of SEO…again.
Over the last few weeks a number of website owners have noticing their web rankings bounce around significantly, in mucha similar fashion to this time last year when Google first released the Panda update on the web world.

Do Filme Kung Fu Panda © by • Happy Batatinha •

Recently, Google has been uncovering and devaluing various methods by which people could ‘buy’ links. Some webmasters who subscribe to Google Webmaster Tools have even received emails warning them of having ‘un-natural’ links within their website profile. Some of these emails seem to even come with ‘penalities’ resulting in rankings drops for the offending sites – although there is great debate about whether these are penalties or loss of link power form devalued links. Google has actually been issuing such emails for some time, what has really changed is the number of emails Google is sending out. This article tells us exactly how much more focused Google are now on telling webmasters they need to ‘clean up their SEO’ to maintain good rankings.

Old Sites Might Be Hit Harder

Sites that have been online for a while may benefit from authority, but they are often more likely to have a number of incoming links from sites/techniques that Google now ‘strongly’ frowns upon. If we go back a couple of years, more SEO companies would have recommended buying links as such techniques worked and at worst were simply devalued. We may find that older sites begin to receive the dreaded GWT emails if they have such links within their profiles.

The Changing World Of SEO

For the first time in my life in SEO, we’re at a point where your method of SEO can have a detrimental affect on how Google see/ranks your end site. This fact is already beginning to change SEO. One thing to watch out for is the growing belief that ‘negative’ SEO may become an online marekting tactic, as Google now penalises websites for having ‘un-natural’ links, many are fearful that more ‘determined’ competitors will simply do/commission some negative link building to their site (instead of, or alongside, creating positive links to their own). If negative SEO does become an online marketing tactic that proves successful, I believe that will indeed be a sad day for the online world.

On the positive side, much of what Panda has brought to Google’s rankings is a good thing. It is much harder to now ‘buy’ your ranking, you have to ‘create’ it via content and content exposure. Search results are more useful and the browser better served on the whole. The increasing importance of content across all web marketing also means we have an improved, content rich internet.

It’s no doubt true that making your website rank well for target keywords is more difficult that it was 2 years ago (pre Panda). SEO is now more dependent on skills often outside of the SEO guy alone, eg content writing, social media etc. With SEO becoming harder and more expensive, this will also push more people towards PPC or other forms of online advertising. In many ways, you can look at Google’s devaluing of ‘paid for’ links as a ‘persuasive push’ to where people should be spending their money. If you spent the money from your paid links on PPC, your ad would still be live. Overall, the constant changes brought by Panda are good for the internet. But they are also good for Google – which is, after all, a public company with a responsibility to its shareholders.

What Does This Mean Going Forward

The internet world is always changing. Given that many people nowadays access the web frequently from a tablet, or a mobile phone which inherently have smaller screens, the prominence of organic listings to PPC has been somewhat reducing for some time. On my HTC android phone, a search for most keywords delivers 3 PPC results and then 2 organic before I have to scroll down for more organic results. With SEO becoming harder, more involved, utilising cross skills sets and add to this the potential threat of negative seo – it makes more sense than it ever has to spread your online marketing to ensure you are never 100% dependent on one method of online traffic.

Are You Saying That SEO Is Less Effective?

Nope, This doesn’t make SEO less effective. High organic search engine rankings will continue to be, in my opinion, the most effectuive way of generating relevant leads for your business at least for the foreseaable future. They are more trusted and offer the strongest brand value for your business. However, SEO is most definitely more involved, expensive and less stable than it was pre Panda.

The growth of the internet over the last few years has brought a number of real competitors to Google, albeit outside of the traditional search engine world. Add to this the fact that almost every business advisor I have ever met warns against having all of your eggs in one basket in any aspect of your business. It is only therefore prudent if, like me you are an SEO focused marketeer, you make a promise to yourself to spread your skillset, knowledge and ultimately online marketing dependence outside of Google.

Go for the organic ranking, but remember to create it. Go for other forms of traffic too, the ones that make most sense for your business and niche, many of these you can ‘buy’. Mix them all up together and you’ll have a very strong online business.

Over the coming blogposts we’ll start to look at what online marketing methods offer the most complimentary mix with SEO.

With the substantial shift in SEO practice towards authority, original content and the like, there has never been more of a need to ensure that your content is seen to be exactly that – yours. As content scrapers keep us on our toes, we need to put measures in place to ensure we don’t give away our well-earned reward for our hard work.

We live in an impatient world. Everything happens in real time, where five minutes ago qualifies as the ‘past’. The problem with this full speed move into real time is that the web is yet to catch up. The internet, though as current a source of information as you can get, was not designed for real time – a fact that means some cash in, and some lose out.

One of the biggest issues with real time is that of content scraping. ‘Scraping’ is the term given to the practice of lifting content, word for word, from sites and passing it off as original content on the new site. With the lack of a real time web, this practice is worryingly easily done. It’s also easy to avoid.

To protect content, pings have traditionally been the main method of claiming authorship. A ping answers the question ‘is the any new content here?’ which then allows the content provider to claim their new content. The problem with this is that the request first needs to be sent for it to be answered. This is an annoyingly inefficient way of making new content updates and leaves potentially plenty of time for a scraper to get in there first.

What is needed is a way of notifying the search engines that there is new content the moment it is published, leaving scrapers no window of time to get there before you do.

Here is where fat pings come in. Traditional pings create an alert that there is new content but supply only the title and sometimes a snippet of the new content. Fat pings notify search engines of the entire content, word for word. By setting up fat pings, you ensure that your new content in its entirety is logged as yours, removing the risk of a scraper getting in and taking your well-earned credit.

Why is protecting your new content with fat pings good for SEO?

Quite simply, if you are seen to be the creator of the content you’ve published, you will benefit from the ranking effect. If you are seen to have copied that content, you won’t. The website that stole it and claimed it will.

Fat pings ensure that you stand the best chance of being seen as the original author and alerts Google up front rather than waiting to be looked at. So not only do you get the best chance of getting the full ranking effect of your new content, it will also be ranked much faster.

Setting up Fat Pings

Depending on where you host your blog, there are a few ways to set up fat pings. Perhaps the easiest way is if you have your blog hosted on Blogger or WordPress.com. Fat pings are set up as standard with these sites. If you use WordPress.org, however, you will need to install http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pubsubhubbub/*
*Remember to disable feed caching if you use any caching plugins.

If you use Feedburner with your blogs, you will need to go to www.feedburner.com to activate ‘pingshot’. This gets Feedburner to ping Google every time it discovers new content in your RSS feed. However, be aware that it may not be wise to rely on Feedburner alone as there is no way of knowing exactly when Feedburner will look at your RSS feed so it potentially leaves a window of opportunity for a content scraper.

It’s easy and quick to protect your content and well worth the small amount of effort required.

For our first post in this fine, new year I thought we’d recap over some of what we discussed last year and outline the key factors that recent results are ‘suggesting’ will have most impact on your SE rankings over the coming 12 months.

2012 is shaping up to be the year that the ‘human’ aspect truly matters in SEO practice. Social media, superb content and a drive for authenticity are all looking to be the areas of best investment for SEO success in 2012.

Links from high-authority, human-edited URLs

The way links are gained and the impact they have can be one of the most changeable (and frustrating) aspects of SEO.

For the biggest potential impact from your link building, look for human edited blogs/articles directories/PR sites etc. Google seems to place a lot of value on sites that an actual ‘human’ has read and subsequently approved any links posted.

Given this, to gain such links brilliant and unique content is very much the order of the day, but what is also increasingly important is the positioning. Content also needs to be appropriate to the requirements of the human edited/high authority site, so take a little time to research your link targets and give them something they really want.

Social Media

SEO and social media have finally taken the plunge, currently living in marital harmony.

Social media as part of SEO really started to boom in 2011 and 2012 seems to be the first year that the two disciplines can no longer be referred to as separate entities. The heavy hitters (Facebook and Twitter) look to reign supreme, much as they have been, but 2012 may well see the continued rise )at least from an SEO point of view) of other social media platform such as ‘discovery engines’ like StumbleUpon and social news aggregators like Digg and Reddit.

And of course, there’s Google Plus. Not to be forgotten, (though easily done, it seems) it should be an interesting year for the social media newbie. Certainly, G+ is not up there with the heavyweights yet and is already upsetting its peers (see this recent article on the BBC). Yet there is no doubt G+ has masses of potential,  if only due to the fact that Google own it! For these reasons alone,  it’s going to be wise to start including G+  within your new year SEO strategy.

Social media continues to be great for getting new content indexed quickly but now it serves a second, high-impact purpose – that of gaining likes, pluses, tweets, bookmarks etc. This online interaction reinforces that human aspect that Google loves so much right now. As mentioned above, social signals are another form of ‘human’ interaction in and around your links.

Authenticity

Never has proving that you are who you say you are been more important than now. Authenticity is set to continue to be a high impact strategy in SEO for 2012.

Authenticity factors can run through almost every part of an SEO strategy. The more than you can show the online that that you are a real person the better. Integrate all of your blogposts/website articles with your social media accounts and ensure that any website you think well of is registered within Google Places, even if only to your own address.

Conclusions

The knock-on effects from the Panda algorithm changes have placed a substantial emphasis on the ‘human’ in SEO for 2012. The more human interaction you can get, the better, so go after those human edited links, likes, retweets, mentions, comments, and bookmarks.

This year I’ll be making some extra efforts to send all site subscribers a regular email covering a number of additional hints to my posts. One thing I’ll be including this month are some hints on how you can generate a regular supply of links in all of the above categories. If you haven’t already signed up, you can do so here.

2011 has been a quite an exciting year in the SEO world, here’s the year in blogposts:
http://www.coffeekicks.com/2011

I do think that, on the edge of the year, Google has managed to make it’s search results more useful and relevant to browsers, so well done to them! This in turn has greatly impacted how we plan and action all our online marketing. Going forward into 2012, if you keep these four words in mind, you should do fine:

Unique Content
High Authority
Authenticity
Social Exposure

I’d like to take this opportunity to wish all Coffee Kicks readers a Very Merry Xmas and a Successful New Year!

Thanks for reading.

Phil

After my last post, ‘Discovering The Authentic Online You‘, a lot of people have asked me how to go about connecting their Google Plus profile with their websites/blogs and articles. I thought the best way to go about doing this was to create a video (2 videos in fact) showing the method that I find works best for me.

I say ‘the method’ as there are are a lot of blogposts out there on this very subject, each with it’s own little variant on how to best go about connecting your profile with your sites. Most of these focus on correctly installing authorship tags into your blog. I go through these too, but I’ve also included a method that utilises your work/website email address that makes the whole process much easier. Do let me know if this method works for you too and don’t forget to login into the members area to grab the html I use on my site and a link to the ‘html in author profiles’ plugin for WordPress.

Part 1:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Part 2:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The concept of authenticity in marketing is not a new one. It has always been there in the handbooks of marketing best practice and it has always been an important attribute of a successful traditional marketing campaign. It now looks like Google is well and truly embracing this tried and tested concept. Hardly surprising, given the sheer number of people (all kinds of people) putting content out on the Internet every day.

Google has done pretty well so far in their campaign to weed out the wheat from the chaff. However, with spam-happy ‘marketers’ become increasingly savvy to the current techniques that can often fool a search engine into ranking their sites, Google has had to up its game once more.

The next prolific ranking factor that looks set to take the world of SEO by storm is that of authenticity.

What is authenticity?

We know what authenticity is, and of course, we have always taken this aspect into account when putting content out there. We want it to have credibility, authority and trustworthiness, and authenticity tends to be lumped in with these traits. However, the previous practice of just ‘covering’ authenticity in content is no longer appears to be quite enough. This factor of ranking looks to be standing on its own two feet these days, requiring special attention in online marketing campaigns.

How do we know that authenticity is definitely a ranking factor?

We don’t. Yet. Right now, the authenticity debate is an on-going one among SEO professionals, spurred on by the increasing number of sites getting good rankings when they don’t seem to have done very much (in a purely SEO sense) for them.

More and more personal blogs are ranking brilliantly with no sign of any traditional on-page SEO. Dig a little deeper and have a look at one of these sites and what you will find is brilliantly written content and plenty of personalisation. You will get a real sense of who the author is with a personal profile and plenty of their own social media links.

So we don’t know that authenticity is a ranking factor. We suspect it is and we find evidence to back up these suspicions. We’ve been right before, so can we afford to overlook this overwhelming ‘gut’ feeling running through the SEO community?

How do you optimise for authenticity?

As with any new ranking factor, there is a large ‘trial and error’ aspect for how best to use authenticity to rank well, but the early trends and also information from Google themselves have provided some useful pointers:

Get a really good copy writer

Content is king. We know this. We hear it all the time and possibly as a result of this, we get belligerent about it. Any efforts going towards enhancing authenticity are worth very little if the copy is mediocre. Copy no longer needs to be really good. It needs to be fantastic.

But authenticity is more than just content. It’s not just about ‘what’ you write, it’s about ‘who’ is writing. People these days are incredibly discerning and need to care about what they are reading and it is authenticity that plays a massive part as to whether someone cares or not.

Be a real person

Both Google and visitors to your site want to know that you are a real person. Google wants to know who you are, what your expertise is and what you should be ranking for. Visitors to your site want to know who you are, why they should listen to you and where they can find more information about you. By showing yourself to be a real person, you answer all of these queries.

Google has always acknowledged that the Internet is full of imposters and false identities. As a result, they have started the authenticity ball rolling by connecting G+ profiles to ownership of websites, blogs and articles. These connections reassure Google of the authenticity of these site owners. It is worth following suit with other social media sites that you, as the author of your site or blog, can connect with. You’re not just trying to reassure Google, you’re reassuring your visitors. Authenticity brings with it trust, and trust is key.

Use local listings

Staking out your place in the real world, not just the online one does a lot to enhance your authenticity. If you have a business with a bricks and mortar office, you are already at an advantage. ‘Real world’ companies elicit perceived trustworthiness and authenticity much more easily than those with a purely online presence. Make use of local listings and local SEO practices.

Authenticity factors and the future

A move towards authenticity could be an extremely positive one. It is another factor that can be used to improve content for search engines as well as the user – a winning combination.

It could also start to address those Internet bashers who still criticise the medium for being full of imposters and untrustworthy characters. Google’s new move will push online authors to be more open, which can only be a good thing for the often mistrusted transparency of the internet.

Online marketeers everywhere can look forward to authenticity becoming a ranking factor. For many, authenticity is already there, it just need to be openly proven.

PR releases form an integral part of any marketing campaign. They were used before the world was online and are used even more now in the digital age.

PR submissions can be such an effective way of getting really decent links and increasing link popularity that only a foolish SEO ignores them. However, though you can get great backlinks from PR releases and boost your rankings nicely, the effect can be rather temporary. PR Releases, by their very nature, are only in the ‘limelight’ for a limited time. So how can you increase the longevity of the effects of PR release backlinks?

Getting high quality PR release backlinks

The first hurdle is getting the links, and getting good links. It’s no secret that one superb quality link from an excellent source is worth putting the effort in for. There is little benefit, especially long-term, in gaining hundreds of mediocre links. With backlinking, it really is quality over quantity and that can be quite a challenge to take on with the new broader online target audience. Gone are the days when it used to be enough to be enough to send your PR release to one or two news wires and consider it a job well done. With the copious numbers of media sites we have today, you have to do a lot more with your PR release to achieve the results you want. You have to earn those backlinks and learn quickly how to pitch for each type of online submission.

As with all content created for the web, the target reader must come first when writing begins. Just the same as we do not write for search engines first, we do not write for backlinks first in a PR release. You cannot afford to lose focus of the purpose of your copy – why you are writing it, who you are writing it for and what effect you want it to have. A little extra time invested at this stage will pay dividends later.

The best backlinks are created between content that is extremely relevant and useful, even educational. This is no less true for PR releases. Yes, the primary function is promotion, but that does not negate any ability to make them tick all the boxes. It is keeping this in mind when writing your PR release that will mean the difference between a whole lot of links that do little and a few links that do masses for your website. The chances of longevity of the effect on your rankings will also improve through the relevance of the information contained in your PR release. A PR release that really makes the grade can get picked up by news sites/social media sites and warrant a live link and a place in the archives so it’s worth getting this part of the process spot on.

Writing the release the right way can even afford you the opportunity to archive the article on your own website, creating permanent content and keeping a backlink to your site. Maybe you will be fortuitous enough to get a mention on a highly relevant blog, securing not only a nice link but a long-lived one.

If done right, and you get decent backlinks, you get a decent effect on your rankings. However, there is nothing more frustrating than seeing your rankings climb and then plummet because what you have actually been working on the last few weeks is a ‘quick fix’.

So how do you keep the rankings longer?

We’ve touched on some of the more obvious ways you can maintain the effect from good backlinks to your PR release – making the content archive-friendly, useful, and with a broad appeal, but what else can you do?

When trying to increase the duration that your PR release backlinks are effective for, what you need to do is increase the length of time your PR release has ‘currentness’. If your PR release becomes outdated, so to will the links associated with it. The tricky bit is maintaining that currentness and that’s where backlinking directly to the release url comes in handy.

Once your PR release starts to lose this ‘currentness’, i.e. when it starts to become yesterday’s news, it’s time to start backlinking to its url. Usually, press-worthy releases naturally attract links on the day of their release and for a few days following. After that, press releases tend to stop attracting links simply due to the fact that they drop down in the ‘latest news’ sections of PR sites, having been replaced by ‘newer’ press releases. Whilst press releases can often rank high themselves, this high ranking is often short-lived due to the sudden decline in link velocity as they fall down the pecking order. Hence, if you start backlinking consistently to your press release, you will give the impression of continued newsworthiness. Your press releases will rank better for longer due to the fact that you are building links to them continuing their relevancy. This, of course, has the knock-on effect of pushing your main site higher through virtue of being linked to by your press releases, which in turn attract ongoing links as part of your SEO campaign.

RSS feeds are useful in many ways. Not only do they allow your website browsers to easily stay updated with your latest info, they are also the easiest way to easily and swiftly send your content elsewhere.

By setting up our RSS feeds to flow into our social media accounts, we can automatically inform all our fans/subscribers/contacts of our new content. In the last post, we looked at how we can combine RSS feeds to make one overall ‘me’ feed which we then used to populate our Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. In this post, we’re going to look at how we can easily turn our latest published article into a tweet.

There are many ways to use an RSS feed to populate a Twitter account, but my favourite method is to use Feedburner.

What Is Feedburner?

Feedburner is an RSS feed management tool that started life way back in 2004. Since then, it has been acquired by Google and now forms part of their free service suit to Google Members. Feedburner adds a range of extended features to your website or blog feed and also comes with a useful analytics package allowing you to easily see how many feed subscribers you have and what parts of your feed they click on. To setup your RSS feed within Feedburner, simply browse to http://feedburner.google.com and login with your Google username and password. Enter your normal RSS feed address and click ‘next’.

Feedburner will give you a new url for your RSS feed. You should now replace the feed link on your website or blog with this new Feedburner url. If you are using WordPress, you can download the Feedburner plugin to help you do this here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedburner-plugin/

Once you have setup your new Feedburner RSS feed, log back into your Feedburner account and do the following:

1. Click on your feed name on the Feedburner welcome screen.

2. Click on ‘Publicize‘ on the top tab navigation.

3. Click on ‘Socialize‘ under the ‘Services’ options located on the left hand side of the ‘Publicize’ screen (see image)

4. Click on ‘Add A Twitter Account‘ and enter your Twitter username and password to authorise Feedburner to post to your Twitter profile.

5. Further down, under ‘Formatting Options‘, I recommend you;

• set ‘post content’ to ‘title only’
• tick ‘include link’
• tick ‘leave room for retweets’
• order items by ‘publish date’

The above will now allow Feedburner to publish all of your latest website or blog updates straight to your twitter account. Overall, a great way to direct (and track) your Twitter followers to your new content instantly!

Have you signed up as a FREE member of Coffeekicks yet? Gain access to a growing list of SEO guides, resources and tutorials here!

Recently you will have noticed CoffeeKicks blogposts taking a distinct social media slant. Since the recent Panda update, it seems many of us are finding that our social media presence has a definite effect on our search engine rankings.

Yet with so any spocial media platforms out there, it come become quite a job to constantly maintain our twitter, facebook, linkedin, bookmarking alongside our constant blogging and standard seo activity.

One thing I have found works well for me is to look at what I want each of my social media accounts to focus on and then decide how I can best update that platform with information. I the use RSS feeds to post to my social media accounts according to the focus I want each of these accounts to bring.

When I say ‘focus’, I simply mean ‘what is this individual social media account about?’ ‘Who, or what, is it seeking to promote?’

For example, I have three main sites that I update more or less weekly – this blog, my main travel site and my new blog on living and working abroad. Each of these three sites have their own Twitter account. Unlike most other social platforms, is searchable and open, ie you do not have to ‘accept’ people into your network. Hence people both ‘ask’ and ‘search’ EVERYONE on twitter for whatever they are seeking. Unless your a celebrity, people are unlikely to search for your name and hence Twitter by it’s nature is topic focused.

Facebook, LinkedIn and any other network that requires us to ‘accept’ people into our network is, also by nature, people focused. We cannot search such networks for ‘things’, we have to first connect with people.

Bearing these differences in mind can really help you make the best of your social media accounts. As said above, I run an individual Twitter account for each of my main sites. IN the next post, I’ll show you how I autofeed my Twitter accounts using the RSS feeds from each and the excellent Feedburner.

Today I’m going to focus on how I feed my Facebook and Linkedin Accounts with all of my blogging activity. The first thing to note here of course is that these two social media accounts are both focused on ‘lil ole me’, the person and author of my three websites. Hence, for these two accounts, it makes sense to feed all of my blogposts from all three websites (ie everything ‘lil ole me’ does) onto these two social media pages. There are two steps I take to achieve this:

Create a combined RSS feed of all your content

1. I take all three RSS feeds and blend them together into one overall ‘me’ RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes.

2. Next, I take this ‘me’ RSS feed and use Hootsuite to feed it onto my LinkedIn and Facebook profile pages.

If you would like to watch me do both of the above steps, please hop on over the Member Area, signup free and access the videos there on this very technique.