SEO Blog from SEOforums.org

Open Graph tags: Make Your Website a Semi-fanpage & Get Permanent Facebook Links

Janis — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:54:43 +0000

Add facebooks open graph meta tags to your website, to get permanent links from Facebook and to make your website a semi-fanpage that can be liked from your website.

Most websites use facebook’s like-button, but forget to include open graph meta tags. The implementation without open graph tags is already usefull, as the website gets a link everytime someone clicks on it (the user who clicks on the like-button will automatically post a link to the website on his wall, which his friends might see in their newsfeed). But by adding open graph tags in addition to a like-button, the like-button gets even more valuable: The user who clicks on the like-button will not only post a link on his wall, but additionally a permanent link will be added to the users profile-page (and the user does not even notice). The link on the profile page will be placed in the category, which has been defined via the open graph tags (see below).

Besides, you will get access to your “likers”, as your website will become an “administrative fanpage” (if you follow the steps below). You might have wondered if it is possible to combine a like-button for your website with a like-button for your fanpage. This is not possible, but by adding open graph tags, you will be able to see who has liked your page and you can reach your fans, as you will be able to post-status updates to their walls.

This “semi-fanpage” is especially usefull for those who haven’t got the time to run a regular fanpage (e.g. you don’t want to spent time updating your fan page regularly), but still want to be able to get in touch with their “likers”.

This is how you do it:

Add the open graph tags from below to your website (you can of course add more if you want)
Remember to define yourself as the Facebook admin (insert your Facebook ID in the last line of the og-tags from below. You can find your Facebook ID by entering your profile on Facebook and looking at the URL e.g. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789 – just copy the numbers and insert them to the fb:admins open meta tag.)
Add a like button to your website – you can find the like-button and other Facebook social plugins here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
If everything is on your website, click the like-button. Hereby you confirm that you are the admin of this website.
Go to Facebook and look under “pages” on the left sidebar. Your website should now appear as a page.

If you want to see who has liked your website, or if you want to send your likers a message (respectively a status update, which will appear in your likers’ stream) just click on your website under “pages”. Now you can update the status of your page or see who has liked your page. In the right sidebar, there should also be a link to Facebooks’ insights, where you can statistics of likes, unlikes and activity of your likers/fans.

Open Graph Tags

These are the basic open graph tags that you should add to your website’s in order to make your website a Facebook object:

You can find all available open graph tags here: http://ogp.me/

The example above shows the open graph meta-tags that I have used for my bands website. If you want your website to show up in a specific category on the users profiles, you just have to define the right open graph type. In my example, I have used the type “band”. As you can see below, this type will place a link to my website in the music category on the Facebook users profiles:

Open Graph Debugging

It is always a good idea to use Facebook’s open graph debugging tool, in order to check if you have inserted the open graph tags in the right way, especially if something does not work as expected:
http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

If you want to see how Google reads your open graph tags you can use Google’s rich snippets testing tool:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Five Pro Tips For Successful Outreach

Janis — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:51:34 +0000

Successful Outreach is something that can be of tremendous value to your site or blog and be so for a great length of time. But it’s not something that comes easy. After all, everyone is Outreaching. And in the end, success comes down to who can Outreach more effectively and more efficiently.

Outreach can be hard work and often it can appear that you’re not making much ground. But the reality is, so long as you’re implementing effective Outreach, the results and rewards will come. And the good news is, each successful Outreach campaign builds upon the next. The more sites and blogs you reach, the further your reach becomes.

But what is effective Outreach?

In this article I will deliver Five tips to keep in mind when engaging in Outreach that will help make your efforts that much more effective and efficient.

Be Patient – Possibly the number one thing to remember. Yes, you would like to contact a site or blog and ask for a link or mention and have them give it to you immediately. But the fact is, it’s not going to happen. Remember, you’re wanting to build a relationship, one that will benefit both you and the target of your Outreach, not just today but for years to come. Building a genuine relationship takes time but the rewards are worth it. So don’t become frustrated and don’t become pushy. Let the relationship develop and let it reward you as it grows.

Be Sincere – Don’t just spam accounts with form emails or make glib mentions of articles on Twitter or forums. Read their work and offer genuine comments. Make a contribution and offer them an insight or present a question that will encourage them to open in a dialogue with you. You don’t just want to be noticed. You want them to notice you as the person behind your site or blog, someone they will want to build a relationship with. In other words, be genuine and be yourself.

Be Generous – Don’t be stingy. Promote the work of the blogs or sites you want to reach out to. It’s an easy, genuine and effective way of getting their attention. You’d be surprised how many will respond to you and it’s an great way of starting a dialogue. It’s a public display of approval of their work. And who doesn’t like a compliment? Also don’t be afraid to promote the work of rival blogs. Have faith in the quality of your work. The blog might be a rival, but if you feel your work is superior to theirs, then any link or mention exchange is going to be of greater value to you than them in the long run.

Be Consistent – Invest a set amount of time every day to do Outreach. Even if it’s only an hour Don’t just pile a lot of work into a week or few days and then leave it for a week or so. That’s not an efficient Outreach strategy. You need to be consistent and engage with those you are reaching out to regularly. That doesn’t mean interacting with them every day, but you do need to do Outreach every day, building on existing relationships or seeking out new ones. Not only is it the most effective way of maintaining and developing these burgeoning relationships, but by applying yourself to the task each day, you’ll find you learn more about what works for you and what doesn’t. In effect, you become better at Outreach.

Be Realistic – Yes, you would love to get a mention or a link from a high powered Twitter account or blog. And if you have quality content, it’s something that you should definitely aspire to. But no matter how good your work is, a high power account isn’t going to take any notice of you until you’ve built up your profile. So aim for those Twitter accounts or blogs with a similar reach as yourself. If you have 300 followers on Twitter, engage with accounts with between 200 and 1,000 followers and as you engage with these accounts, you’ll soon see your followers rising. Surf the crowd and soon enough you’ll have enough followers to get yourself noticed by the bigger accounts.

This is a guest post by Andrew Brocker, blogger at BettingExpert.com

Epic Spam Fail from TOPRUNGSEO

MOGmartin — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 15:36:27 +0000

Hands down the best spam email I’ve received in quite a while (courtesy of “top rung seo” aka toprungseo.com), is the screenshot below.

To see why I found this pretty hillarious, just read the text on the site they are offering to SEO: mogmedia.co.uk (which used to be my consultancy homepage until 2007).

Come on guys! If you are going to blind spam anyone with a .co.uk domain, you might want to filter out other SEO’s first

SEO Jobs at OMD!

MOGmartin — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 14:24:57 +0000

As some of you will be aware, I am head of SEO for OMD – the worlds largest digital media agency, with offices in 140 countries and over 8,000 staff.

As part of our SEO expansion, we are looking to fill a number (more than 10) vacancies in our London offices.

If you are a great SEO, and would like to work for OMD, a part of Omnicom then this could be the opportunty for you:

SEO Vacancies:

SEO Associate Directors

We currently have the requirement to add several Associate Director level SEO’s to our expanding team at OMD. This is to handle existing work and major new account wins.

The successful applicants for this role will have strong experience in running SEO campaigns, including in depth knowledge of both on and off site ranking factors to an expert level. Applicants must be up to date with the latest developments in SEO and be passionate about search marketing. Experience of working on major accounts for large scale enterprise customers, either in house or within an agency is a clear benefit for the right candidates.

Furthermore they will be independent in their approach, able to hit the ground running and capable of managing their own team with client facing skills.

This is a top level SEO job working with some of the biggest client accounts in the UK – if you are a top level SEO then this is perhaps the biggest opportunity to further your career within the United Kingdom.

Required skills:
on-site technical SEO analysis
off-site linkbuilding experience across multiple disciplines
Google analytics to an expert level, other packages an advantage
Webmaster tools proficiency
an expert understanding of any of the following is an advantage: html, css, LAMP, enterprise CMS frameworks.
Social media awareness (well-established presence an advantage)

please submit your CV to: seojobs@omddigital.co.uk .

SEO Client Managers

We have the requirement to add several SEO Client Managers to our expanding team at OMD. This is to handle existing work and major new account wins.

The successful applicants for this role will have experience in working within organic search, preferably agency-side. Additionally full knowledge of the mechanics of both on site optimization and linkbuilding are required.

The right applicants will be capable of taking a lead role within client accounts, be well spoken, accountable and have a proven track record of success.

This is a unique opportunity to work on some of the UKs biggest brands search presence and further your career within the framework of one of the world’s largest digital agencies.

Required skills:
on-site technical SEO analysis
off-site linkbuilding experience across multiple disciplines
Google analytics to an expert level, other packages and advantage
Webmaster tools proficiency
an understanding of the following is an advantage: html, css, LAMP, enterprise CMS frameworks.
social media awareness (well-established presence an advantage)

please submit your CV to: seojobs@omddigital.co.uk .

SEO Executives

We have the requirement to add several SEO Executives to our expanding team at OMD. This is to handle existing work and major new account wins.

The successful applicants for this role will display a high level of interest in organic search and have a basic understanding of how search engine algorithms work and how you would apply best practices to big brand websites to improve their presence.

The correct applicants will be well versed in Microsoft office tools including excel, word and PowerPoint.

This opportunity would allow you to work with and learn SEO within one of the best SEO teams in the UK, working exclusively on big brand, blue-chip multinational accounts.

Full training will be provided to the correct applicants.

Required skills:
knowledge of basic on and off site optimisation, or demonstrable desire to learn quickly
knowledge of google analytics
English fluency required, other languages an advantage
social media awareness

please submit your CV to: seojobs@omddigital.co.uk .

SEO Copywriters

We have the requirement to add several SEO Copywriters to our expanding team at OMD. This is to handle existing work and major new account wins.

The successful applicants for this role will be passionate about creating compelling, world class content for use on both client websites and third party properties.

The correct applicants for this position will be experienced in using Microsoft office tools and have an existing portfolio of content that they have produced.

Having worked within a transactional ecommerce website will be an advantage, but not required.

Required skills:
Strong knowledge of Microsoft office tools, including word and excel
English fluency required, with a high level of experience in content production.
other languages an advantage

please submit your CV to: seojobs@omddigital.co.uk .

SEO is Dead

MOGmartin — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:52:17 +0000

Its been a while since I posted here on the blog, sorry about that – its been a fairly busy month with SMX Advanced, SASCON, SearchMarketingDay and QUAD SEO conferences to speak at – not to mention my new job…

Anyway – the thing that has prompted this post, bringing me fleetingly out of blogging retirement was a discussion I had on Friday night with an old friend of mine (we’ve known each other for over 20 years), Alistair Shaw.

The friend in question is a “crack ninja superstar rock hero” (or however else you should refer these days to people that are good at their job) PHP developer. Together over the years we have worked on quite a few projects together and I am in no doubt as to his expertese. Basically, I respect his opinion in a lot of matters – but this proved to be a bit “controversial”

AS: “so, this SEO thing, its dead now right?”

MM: “I hope not, Ive just started a new job as head of SEO What makes you say that though?”

AS: “well, I remember back in the day we used to just add a keywords, make sure the title tag and meta descriptions etc. were right, buy some links and stuff would rank. That doesnt work anymore does it?”

MM: “so you’re boiling down search engine optimization into keyword stuffing and link manipulation? What you don’t realise is that SEO has developed, ranking factors are measured in the hundreds, sites have become more complex along with the algo & finally, the stakes have never been higher with increasing PPC costs and a widening long tail.”

Editors note: The conversation then wound on for some time about the finer points of SEO. And some rather excellent Polish vodka thanks to the guys at SearchMarketingDay.

It is indicative though of one of the major problems we face as an industry. The lack of recognition across a diverse range of other disciplines.

The fact is within the advertising and marketing industries SEO is not respected (enough) as a skill in its own right. PPC doesnt suffer from that fate, as google have done a fantastic job in teaching people about the uplift of paid search campaigns.

Even within web development, SEO is regarded by many at best as irrelevant, at worst as snake oil.

Search Engine Optimization needs a makeover. Heck, it needs an extreme makeover. If someone wants to grab the industry by the scruff of the neck and start shouting from the rooftops about it, we should all be grateful, not critical.

The few that are doing that right now are either under recognised, or overly criticised for gaining status within a small industry.

I implore you all people – take the time out to
TEACH SOMEONE what SEO actually is.

TEACH SOMEONE how SEO is more cost effective than PPC.

TEACH SOMEONE how you can use natural search to engage target demographics.

JUST TEACH SOMEONE. Please.

Rant over.

SMX Advanced London Live Blog

MOGmartin — Thu, 12 May 2011 13:30:10 +0000

Over the next two months I’m speaking at 5 search conferences in London and Manchester (UK), as well as Poznan (Poland) and Seattle (USA).

This coming Monday the 16th and Tuesday the 17th of May, I will be speaking at SMX Advanced in London.

On day one I will be moderating the “Advanced Link Building, Link Alchemy” panel, in which Patrick Altoft (branded3), Rob Millard (Distilled), Kelving Newman (Site Visibility) & Pete Wailes (Strategy Internet Marketing) will be speaking.

On day two, I’m presenting a session on how to engage with consumers on Twitter as part of the “Beyond Search, Leveraging Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin” alongside Matt Lawson (Marin) and Merry Morud (aimClear).

Both sessions promise to be huge, with great insights on both SEO linkbuilding and social marketing, but I understand that a lot of my blog readers are not based in the United Kingdom or are not able to make the conference itself, which is why:

LIVEBLOG is now live updates appear below automatically!

[liveblog]

Get SEOmoz PRO FREE

MOGmartin — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 10:54:35 +0000

If you haven’t used the SEOmoz tools before, you are missing out on the worlds best tools to optimize and analyze your website.

I cant speak highly enough of the resources that SEOmoz provide their PRO customers, and for a limited time only, they have extended an offer to all members here at seoforums.org – a FREE 30 DAY TRIAL!

All you need to do to get the best SEO tools available for free, is sign up through the banner below!

So sign up right now, and take your SEO to the next level!

Capitalization in Google Serps Destination URL

MOGmartin — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 08:51:49 +0000

Seeing something new on google.com today, (not on google.co.uk) – there seems to be selective capitalization within the destination URL fragment displayed in organic serps:

As you can see the results look like:

Forums.seoChat.com
seoForums.org

Anyone else seeing this?

+ interestingly about two months ago they stopped capitalization within adwords results. Not sure why the different approach.

Google Panda Update UK Analysis

MOGmartin — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 15:01:55 +0000

Many of you will know that I work in house in a company that operates a pan European ticket marketplace, Seatwave.

Its a great industry to work in (lots of nights out, constantly evolving marketplace etc) but one of the drawbacks that we struggled with historically has been content sourcing. While there are a million things that can be said about most artists (just look at Justin Bieber on twitter as point in case), the actual mechanism of buying your tickets isn’t the piece of the value chain that fans are interested in or indeed passionate about.

However since the MayDay update, the writing has been on the wall for all eCommerce sites, big or small – either get content, or get out.

That’s pretty much the same message in both the Panda and MayDay updates, so why people are all of a sudden upset I’m not really sure.

Data Capture

I track competitive SERPS for around 700 queries – these are primarily “artist name + tickets” searches – for instance “Kylie Minogue Tickets” is a good example. If you’re interested I use Advanced Web Ranking by Caphyon for this reporting, I’ve found it to be the most dependable of all my rank trackers and I fully endorse it.

Big Losers

Lets look at an example:

SoldOutEventTickets.com

Sold Out Event Tickets are the oldest of all the secondary ticket marketplaces in the UK (probably in Europe for that matter) and are part of TicketMaster, the monopolistic entertainment ticketing company with an overwhelming market share worldwide.

For years now they have maintained competitive rankings down purely to a few factors:

1) domain age
2) links from Ticketmaster (again, the authority in this vertical)

They have never however invested time or money into:

1) unique content (all theirs is aggregated from a variety of sources, and whatever is unique is so far below the fold its irrelevant to the random surfer.
2) social interaction (they have none)
3) UGC (reviews etc)

The screenshot below shows my Advanced Web Ranking data comparing yesterday to today:
(please note, this screenshot was taken a few hours into my AWR scrape, I will replace it with the full update tomorrow)

Its important to point out at this point that this isnt the only site affected in this update, in reality the “lower order” of automated sites have all been hit to a certain degree, but as this example have consistanly ranked well down to domain level factors the drop looks particularly bad.

Running the same analysis on the fresher generation of sites, they are up on average – not in my opinion due to any improvements on those properties, just that SoldOutEventTickets and other players with similar site structures have been penalised.

Analysing Site Content

Take a look at these pages as a direct comparison:

Kylie Minogue
Sold Out Event Tickets – Seatwave

Take That
Sold Out Event Tickets – Seatwave

As you can see on the above examples, the affected site is missing “unique” content, UGC, and social signals. This is nothing new, this is really the SEO 101 stuff that google have been preaching and reputable SEO’s have been practicing for years now. This update is just weeding out sites that havent followed the mantra of google in the 21st century.

Arguably the domains that have been booted in this update had few “page level indicators” of value, all of the strength that was keeping them ranked well came from domain level metrics.

If that’s the case then this update is probably good for “the little guys” out there that have the mobility to create great content, but don’t have a monolithic domain behind them that’s unfairly perhaps creating results that have meant they can outrank better content on smaller sites.

The Sum Up

If you don’t have a content rich site, you’re not going to get any love out of google any more. Make sure your sites are well updated, fresh, have compelling content and data, utilise UGC, push social signals etc.

IMAGE DISCOVERY CREDITS:
I asked on twitter earlier if anyone had any “good” images of panda’s to use, the first one was suggested by Simon Panting, a self proclaimed apple fanboy and purveyor of banter, the second was suggested by Bob Meijer, a good friend of mine and co-incidentally a London based googler.

Lost in Translation: Google Algo Update 06-04-2011

MOGmartin — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 10:05:59 +0000

I started noticing a large-ish drop off in google organic traffic to seoforums.org last night.

This is something that I’ve been through a few times before so as soon as these changes occur it generally means a late night, lots of coffee and much concern.

Around 2am I finished my analysis and pretty much knew what was going on, but needed to wait until this morning to publish the findings just in case it was a matter of GA being slow to update (that doesnt happen anywhere near as often as it did 3 or 4 years ago, but it was still a possibility).

Google Algo Update: Lost in Translation

Since September last year, I’ve been using a plugin here on seoforums.org which auto translates all of the content on pageload to a new URL in the members selected language of choice. It then saves that page into a cache database to increase performance for future pageloads (refreshing every so often depending on the page type).

So far this just sounds like pretty common google translate spam right?

Wrong.
The plugin also detects posts made in foreign languages and translates them out to all 30+ other languages used here on seoforums.org – therefore (and lots of people do this) you can see people posting in greek, speaking to someone posting in arabic, and someone else speaking in French. Each one of those posts are seen in each users native language as defined when they signed up.

Its a beautiful system. That is NOT google auto translate spam, that is a legitimate translation use of their API in my opinion.

The Setup:

when I started using the plugin, I registered each of the subfolder sites as specific websites in Google Webmaster Tools, as you can see from this screenshot. I then went on to geo-target each of the subfolders to the relevant countries. Linkbuilding to these subfolders has been entirely organic (I’ve never bought a link for this site full stop).

I’ve also submitted a specific XML sitemap for every regional variation of seoforums.org and each of the sites within GWT is correctly reporting the search queries, volumes, site speed etc. all as you would expect for any other site.

In short, I didn’t do this “a la spam” site – I built it properly.

The Results:

until yesterday I was pleasantly surprised with the results. After a slow-ish start it was building up a nice % of overall google organic traffic. Over the last week or so these landing pages have been receiving more or less a thousand additional visits per day, at a bounce rate no worse than the rest of the site (and much better than some pages in english – but thats another story).

As you can see from this graph, there was a heck of a fall off sometime yesterday:

Additionally, when searching google.co.uk with a site:seoforums.org command, you saw lots of “junk”, ie. the homepages for each foreign language was listed in the top 50 results.

This wasn’t really a great UX, but then how many people actually search with the site: command that aren’t SEO’s? Furthermore – as I’d submitted each sub folder as a different geo-targeted site so frankly google shouldn’t have been displaying them in the .co.uk results anyway.

I must stress that I DO NOT BELIEVE that my use of the google translate API in this case is spammy.

Its creating a legitimate forum in dozens of languages, and allowing people of diverse nationalities to discuss topics in their native languages. Some of them (ie. the Spanish one) are great translations. I know some are rubbish, but I’m relying on google’s own API for quality.

My Conclusions:

it does appear that google yesterday rolled out an algo update which has improved their detection of auto translated pages and removed them from the index.

That will be of benefit to most consumers in removing yet more of the junk that has been out there for some time, but in my case I do feel a little let down – there is no other way for me to translate a site which is 100% UGC and updated constantly.