In July 2007 the Telegraph decided to change the traditional publishing workflow for production of the website. The changes included taking a web first publishing model. Journalists were also encouraged to publish their own articles. Alongside this an SEO team was set up and their goal was to get every content item optimised for search and indexed by the three main search engines.

At this point the publishing model looked something like this:

The process began by getting senior editorial staff behind the plan. Without this the project would’ve been mainly academic. A high level plan was proposed to these staff so they knew what was to follow. Firstly the definition of publishing best practice was defined. From this the technical aspects of SEO could be incorporated into the content management system [CMS]. These two elements work together to deliver the opportunity to have every piece of content optimised for search engines.

Following on from this two training tracks were designed to train the editorial staff. The first was web publishing best practice and the second was the concept of SEO.

Simplified web publishing model:

As these new techniques began to be incorporated into the publishing cycle so the role of the SEO had to evolve. Publishing quality and best practice is a moving target as are keyword patterns. By embedding these skills into the process giving near instant feedback on publishing the team was able to cover the three main high-volume publishing areas, News, Sport and Finance.

This role not only provided publishing support and keyword research it also started to provide trend information and feedback on Google News positioning. Trend data was driven from sources such as Twitter and Google News most popular but also on site sources such as internal search and [more recently] Google Analytics real time.

SEO input into the publishing cycle:

After many trials and experiments the process has matured into solid SEO that is incorporated into the publishing workflow. The daily morning SEO report defines the agenda. A review of Google News, trending topics and keywords and how well the Telegraph is doing is the benchmark for the day.

Three news conferences through the day, 9/12/4, inform the department heads by highlighting SEO and publishing issues, defining opportunities, refine keyword strategies and report how well things are doing. The editor is present at the news conferences and this makes it a very effective forum for achieving publishing goals.

Trending data is constantly being feed into the publishing desks. This helps take advantage of more opportunities and also highlight what different audiences are seeking out. This type of information can also be gleaned from historical sources and data mining provides valuable insight to repeating events.

As news events solidify keyword research can be used to optimise topic pages as these are created. A calendar is used to plan events to ensure topic pages are optimised and published in plenty of time to allow the SEO to build up. Keyword research can be done with many different tools but usually starts with Google Insights and then to Wordtracker for repeating topics.

All of this is evaluated through publishing standards. Optimising a story maybe let down by a number of factors but these are what we evaluate against:

• Headline [keywords to the left, full names]
• Abstracts [repeating keywords and expanding on the headline]
• Promotion [are the stories highlighted on the right pages]
• Links [are the right links on the story to recent and relevant content]
• Publishing time [has the story been published at the right time]
• Pictures [keywords on picture filename, caption and alt text]
• Sections [is the content published in the right section]

Through all of this it is acknowledged that it isn’t a perfect model as it is difficult to monitor every piece of content, so not always 100%. Having so many publishers can lead to some rigid rules. Through the process of continued improvement the model does work well and does allow rapid and high volume publishing.

Richard Underwood is Head of SEO at Telegraph Media Group which includes web properties such as jobs and travel. You can follow him on Twitter @rich_underwood and Google+ richard.underwood101

Image credit: Sergiu Bacioiu

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On Thursday I presented on Gamification with Jeff Coughlan from Matmi.com at SAScon in Manchester. Jeff’s presentation (which I hope gets published online) was fantastic and really gave the audience a core understanding of what Gamification is, and is not. It was an honour to be in the presence of a games coder with 20+ years in the field. After Jeff spoke, I covered Gamification from the perspective of an SEO.

Most insightful talk of the day from @Matmi & @SEOgadget on #Gamification, got us thinking, thanks guys #SAScon

— Andrew French (@andrewfrench) May 17, 2012

Read this Book

Before I get started, I’ll point out that you should definitely read Gabe Zichermann’s “Gamification by Design“, co-authored with Christopher Cunningham. It’s an excellent introductory read to the concept of Game Mechanics and gives a solid background on the historic roots of Gamification principles.

Here’s an excellent introductory video, and you can check out previous posts on the topic on SEOgadget, here and here.

If You Have a Crappy Product, Gamification is Unlikely to Help

It’s a fair point. If you’re selling crap on the internet, points, badges and leaderboards are never going to sell you more crap on the internet. There are (unfortunate) exceptions to this, but they tend to be examples of terrible games with brilliant game mechanics wrapped around them.

You either have to build very small Gamified features (which we’ll cover in this post) or devise a beautiful, unique experience with Gamification elements engineered in at the core, just like my favourite designer’s showcase and textbook Gamification example, Dribbble.com:

 
Here are 15 ways to add Gamification into your SEO strategy.

#1 Award Points for Participation

Rule 101 of Game Mechanics: award points for participation. SEOmoz have led in this field for as long as I remember, with points awarded for QA and commenting. A self regulating mechanism exists where other users can thumbs down, should a comment be poor, spammy or plainly in conflict with the community guidleines.

#2 Integrate a Leaderboard to Rank Your Heavy Users

If you’re collecting participation data about your users, let’s say, experience points, then why not rank those users based on the most active? I had an interesting conversation with Dan Sodergreen after the session and we mutually agreed that integrating other metrics, such as Klout score would be a really interesting addition to an otherwise internally focused leaderboard. Having a leaderboard encourages competition, provided the incentive to do so is appropriate. That incentive could be as simple as recognition and status in and outside of the gamified system.

#3 Create a Virtual Currency to Apply Reward Discounts on your Retail Site

Fab.com has a clever customer referral scheme. Introduce friends, and Fab.com will reward you with currency to spend in their store. Note the simplicity of the “invite more people” section with integration with Gmail and GMX.

#4 Allow Your Users to Earn Status

People desire status. Look at “Top Contributors” in the Google forums. Those guys get flown out to Google to take part in the Top Contributor Summits. You have to participate heavily (and to some extent compete) for this level of status, and people do! Meetups for VIP’s, your heaviest users and biggest brand advocates are easy to organise and execute.

#5 Create Tangible Rewards for Your Users Who Participate, like Stickers

Entertainment check-ins grew by 800% in 2011 for GetGlue.com, reaching a record high of 11.5 million check-ins in August last year. Tangible rewards don’t have to be financial incentives, they can be small things, like sweets, stickers, cakes (thanks Neeru) even handwritten thank you notes.

#6 Incentivise Profile Completeness

Profile completeness indicators are pretty standard, but LinkedIn.com’s profile completeness incentive is quite interesting. They visually communicate levels thair users need to complete with a promised reward at the end. In my case; 12 times the potential career opportunities. Thanks Linkedin, but I think I’m OK for those for now.

#7 Reward Your Users for Creating Content or Ideas

Every SEO I know is involved with the creation of content, be it via a content team, outsourcing or by themselves. Why not get your users to submit the content for you? We’ve just completed an exciting Gamification project with a recipe startup – needless to say their raw material is recipe submissions, so we’re helping them incentivise users who do so. Let’s not forget Youmoz and SEOmoz QA, excellent examples of community content contribution and participation.

I love using TheFunTheory.com as an example of user generated assisted link bait via creative competition entries.

#8 Incentivise Content Creation with Financial Reward

Actually pay people for their hard work? Ok. Via Minted.com you can submit a greetings card design, the community votes and the retail site sells the winning designs. The winning contributors receive prize money and ongoing commission for their sales.

#9 Motivate Your Visitors to Register

I love how Cheezeburger use loss aversion to encourage new visitors to register, or previously registered users to login. As a visitor, you participate (rating memes, clicking links) and a pop up appears awarding a badge. To keep the badge, you have to login!

#10 Motivate Your Users to Refer a Friend by Giving Away a Little of What You Offer

Dropbox incentives to refer a friend exist on almost every channel imaginable and they reward their users for learning more about the product, following them on Twitter, giving feedback. It’s a simple, gamified system with a clear and appropriate reward for carrying out the actions most important to the growth of their business. I suppose that’s why they’ve grown so well with very low marketing budgets. PS: follow this link if you’re thinking of signing up for Dropbox…

#11 Motivate Your Users to Link to You

In the Dropbox example, I just linked out because I’ll get something for it. While some SEO’s argue the case against this practice, I think it’s ok most of the time. I use dropbox, I’m a happy customer and I would vouch for their service with our without the extra space awarded via referral. There are heaps of different ways to incentivise users to send traffic to you via referral link (affiliate programs aside), and the reward doesn’t necessarily have to be anything more than a simple value-add to your target site – embeddable objects can look great, users gain by improving the quality of their content.

SEOmoz have a refer a friend program that uses a 302 redirect on the referrer link, to play it totally safe, while Google encourage you to link to them in exchange for authorship snippets in the search results:

#12 Implement a QA System for Long Tail and User Votes

Last year we helped a small car finance operation called carfinance247 develop their long tail traffic via a QA system. We learned, through keyword research that users tend to ask a lot of questions about finance, for example: “how can I get approved for a car loan with a CCJ?”. We implemented a simple system that took off and grew very quickly. This is SEO traffic to their QA section since launch:

It’s extremely simple, where users can rate responses according to usefulness, and reply if they choose. We discussed running internal competitions for in-house staff to compete for prizes based on the number of thumbs-up they get from visitors.

#13 Create Badges that Evidence Expertise (and add to your user profile pages)

I really don’t like the way badges get plastered on almost everything in the name of gamification. Users earn badges for hard work, participation, fun, learning – and when they’re a valued commodity, you’ll get a community seeking ways to earn more. Codeacademy displays the badeges you’ve earned on your profile page. This partial nod to self expression (along with the ability to upload your own photo) might encourage more people to link to their profiles from say, their Google+ pages. I do:

#14 Award Points and Badges for Comments

If you want an out-of-the-box community management tool for WordPress, Disqus would be a great place to start. Their (upgraded) comments plugin creates a community leader-board for your site to rank most frequent commenters. Be warned that while Disqus is a free plugin, their ranks functionality starts at $299 a month.

#15 Focus Social Activity on a Shared Outcome

Back in September 2011, Innocent gave away veg pot offers and numerous discounts in a twitter campaign called Tweet and Eat. The campaign gave consumers a discount depending on the number of people that tweeted its hashtag #tweetandeat. Based on the volume reached, you could opt to recieve a DM with notification of the next discount code available. Very smart and as Hannah puts it, one of the brands that really “get it”.

 
This post made possible with thanks to Joanna Lord, Lindsay Wassell, Hannah Smith, Gianluca Fiorelli, Fabian Alvares and Stephanie Chang.

 Image Credit: wnd.andreas

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Earlier this week I had a lot of fun putting together a presentation for (a thoroughly excellent) SMX Advanced. Originally I was going to broach the (often slightly) dry topic of using Person Schema (or hCard) to get “people” rich snippets for author pages. As it turns out, using hCard or Schema.org on an author page to get a rich snippet doesn’t work. That’s a different story and one I’ll come on to in another post. This story’s quite a lot more interesting.

Late on the eve of my presentation I was stressing that my test didn’t work and I needed a near total rewrite of my presentation for the “Schema and Authorship, One Year On” session. With Game of Thrones playing in the background, I had my moment of inspiration.

“How many review rich snippets are our retail clients competing with on page 1 of Google’s search results?”

Rich Snippets (Review Ratings) Increase CTR by 5%

Late last year, we carried out some testing with SERP Turkey to examine the impact that a range of changes to the description wording may have on click through, depending on intent. As a side note to that experiment, we introduced a rich snippet to the a/b test, which yielded a measurable, significant change to click through.

During the testing we introduced a third variation (the inclusion of a rich snippet) in the transactional scenario. The final result was perhaps unsurprising. The transactional variation received 21.52% CTR. Our rich snippet, transactionally worded variation won at 26.32% CTR. The rich snippet version in the test, ranking in 2nd place was easily receiving more clicks than 1st place. That conclusion really makes a dent in reliability of arbitrary click through rate studies, because let’s be honest with ourselves, they’re nonsense.

Rich Snippets Increase Your CTR but Everyone’s Doing it

Surely they do and unfortunately, they are. My moment of inspiration was to come up with a quick way to measure the saturation levels of rich snippets reviews in search rankings. More specifically, to revise the question:

“How many keywords in my top 500 referrers are competing with a review rich snippet on Page 1 of Google’s organic results?”

I think this search result sums it up nicely; there are so many options to get eyeballs on your content, video, image, etc; so are you so sure rich snippets are the right strategy?

With a little help from Dan, we nailed the method to measure exactly that – SERP saturation of review snippets across a set group of keywords. Here’s the outcome:

Nothing to see here! In SEOgadget’s top 500 referring keywords from Organic search, 13% share page 1 of the search results with at least one site that has review rich snippets. A pleasantly surprising and uncrowded result. Now, compare it to our retail site – PrezzyBox, long-time SEOgadget friends and clients, who kindly allowed us to perform the same check on their top 500 referring keywords:

Wow – Fewer than 9% of the top 500 search queries have no review rich snippets on page one. I suppose that’s hardly a surprise but nonetheless, the retail space seems quite saturated with organic rich snippets.

Measuring with SEO Tools for Excel, and xPathOnURL

As it turns out, if you request a Google search result from SEO Tools for Excel, or Google Docs, you get the non-Js version of the search results pages. When there’s a rich snippet visible in that particular SERP, a div container styled with class="star" contains a ".". You can detect this, and even count the number of occurances to work out how many of them exist on the page.

Here’s a simplified version of the SEO Tools for Excel Query:

=XPathOnUrl([YourGoogleSearchQueryWithKey+word],"//div[contains(@class, 'star')]")

So you can use that to work out if the marker is present on the page, wrap it in an IF statement using the same principles in this post on how to check if a link is still live.

The same formula works in GDocs, just swap XPathOnURL with ImportXML

Here’s what you can build:

This is a snapshot of one of my dashboards, where I’ve got snippet, shopping, video and image data combined.

Here’s how to get result data from organic search including a count of the number of image, video and shopping results:

Get Advanced Web Ranking – it’s the best rank checker in the market and it scales well with a decent proxy. To collect image, video, news and shopping results in the data, you need to create a campaign with Google Universal (in your country). Collect the rank data as usual, and head to the “Data” tab. From there, use the “Split the results into Organic, images, video, news, shopping” check box.

From here you can construct a really rich dataset, and start considering this important point: just because everyone else is doing it, should you? Here’s the presentation:

Image credit: San Diego Shooter

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Even before I started out blogging back in 2007 I made a bold claim in a guest post on one of the most important blogs in that time: You don’t need conventional SEO, you just have to create a great site and great content and solely promote these a little.

One of my main suggestions was to submit your well designed site to CSS galleries.

Back in those days many sites were still done in Flash. Flash websites are rare these days for good reasons but the technique I propagated back then still hasn’t gone mainstream.

Isn’t the SEOgadget site worth being listed in a web design gallery?

Low level SEO practitioners still rather advise you “to submit to social bookmarking sites” even though they mean sites like Reddit or StumbleUpon which never were about social bookmarking in the first place and even Delicious has abandoned the strict social bookmarking model by now.

In 2012 most business people design great sites and create great content, everybody knows that you need both a great user experience and well crafted content adding value to:

• make people link to you
• make social media users share your links
• convert users to buyers

It’s not just about great user experience and great content, contrary to what some Google employees might suggest. Build it, write it and they will come doesn’t work.

It’s about promoting your greatness in places where people can appreciate it. Then these people and others will link, share and convert.

So whether you succeed online today or not depends on the fact whether you reach a targeted audience of influencers who can have an impact on others. It’s about finding those influencers. You can do it on

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest or even Google+ depending on your industry or niche but it takes a lot of work to build an audience there. Why not go where the people already are? Why not tap into existing communities? Why not please people who already wait for your great design and content?

Today I want to show you places where such small highly dedicated communities dwell and who await your submissions

unlike social bookmarking users who do not in most cases. There are literally hundreds of submission sites for web designs, design news or even special content types like infographics. I’d like to focus on sites that are high quality, where existing audiences can appreciate your submission.

So this is not a list about all the sites you can submit but only a handful of those that are worth it: High quality web design showcases, news & infographics submission sites

Web Design Galleries

There are three kinds of sites in this list category, web design galleries, minimalist web design showcases and pure CSS galleries. The name are already quite self-explanatory so don’t submit Flash sites to CSS galleries or complex portals to minimal design exhibits.

• Best Web Gallery
• Submit Your Site | siiimple
• Submit a Site | Minimal Exhibit
• CSS Drive- Submit a CSS Gallery site, News item, or CSS example
• CSSelite.com » How to submit
• cssgallery.com – Submit a Site
• Submit to CSS Loggia
• cssstyle » Submit a Site
• HTML5 Gallery – Submit a site

Design News

Some of these design news sources are one man shows curated by the owners, others are communities where you have to join. On DesignFloat there is even voting involved to appear on the front page. Sometimes you have to fill in a contact form in other cases it’s possible or even better to contact the curators via Twitter.

• Sharebrain
• Submit News – DesignM.ag
• Submit Your Design News Article | Design News
• Community News | The Design Work
• Submit | DesignFloat
• Design and all about it!
• Design Jojo
• Community News | Dzinepress

Infographic Sites

Some sites that feature infographics are nothing more than simple Tumblr blogs. There is an ages old authority like information aesthetics I was reading as far back as 2005 I think, long before the infographics wave we experience until now. There are also some communities you have to sign up for.

• Infographics & Data Visualizations | Visual.ly
• Contact information aesthetics
• Cool Infographics – Contact
• Daily Infographic | Contact
• Submit your infographic to the Infographics Archive Database
• Visual Loop – Welcome
• Submit infographic to Infographicas.com

Also don’t forget that it’s not the typical “submit your site to 1000 social bookmarking sites ” aka spam. Don’t automate the process and duplicate your descriptions. Make sure to submit manually to the appropriate sites.

It’s not about the sheer number. You want to attract the few influencers who check out these site and inspire them to spread your link.

Also there is always someone who checks whether the site/content you submit is high quality as well plus on topic. So don’t waste your time and the time of other people by submitting your site where it does not belong.

You think your website is not about web design so you have nothing to submit? Well, you have a web design, don’t you? In case you don’t you may need a relaunch. Otherwise create a case study or write a story about how your web design helped with sales. Everybody can do that. Or create an infographic about your industry. There is always a way to approach the web design community.

Last but not least don’t forget about Pinterest users who might pin your website as a whole as long as there is a screenshot somewhere like in this post.

Additional Resources

• 16 Best Web Design Galleries for Inspiration
• The Great Website Design Gallery Roundup by CSS-Tricks
• What websites can you submit infographics to? – Quora
• Best Free Tactics for Infographic Promotion by Vertical Measures
• Infographics Sites | The Infographics Showcase

High Quality Web Design Showcases, News & Infographics Submission Sites is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

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Our growth in the past year has been exponential – 279% (comparing April 2011 to April 2012) to be exact. In fact we’re growing so fast that I’m taking some “push harder” decisions in a few key areas of our business. In the next month, we’re prioritising acquiring people in:

- More resource in frontline SEO staffing (Senior, Middleweight and Junior)
- Sales support (likely a Sales manager / Exec role)
- EA / Office Administration support

Our success has been entirely down to our people delivering great work for our clients, while we get brilliant recommendations via our existing clients, fantastic access to industry conferences, word of mouth referrals and support from great friends in the industry. As a result we’re retaining well while winning bigger and bigger brands and contracts. It’s a super exciting time to become part of our friendly, talented team who are helping to build what will easily be a record year (I *think* we’re going to come in around the £1.1m turnover mark at the end of this year – not bad for our third financial year).

I’d like our company to be filling up this lovely new office within the next 12 months:

On that note:

We’re hiring talented, exceptional people. Hear that? Talented! Exceptional!

You don’t have to have any experience in SEO, or CRO. I’ve learned that smart people learn fast and quickly start delivering incredibly exciting new pieces of work – so talented, exceptional and smart people need only apply. Well, ok if you’re pitching a senior SEO role to me then yeah, you need some experience – but don’t panic if you don’t!

We train the right people in subjects like:

- Analytics (each consultant is GAIQ certified)
- Keyword Research
- Link Building
- Technical SEO (Accessibility / Strategy / Tools)
- Video SEO, Ecommerce and Local
- Viral Content / Infographics
- Excel Mastery
- Conversion Rate Optimisation

Of course if you’re applying for the Executive Assistant role, you’ve got a huge opportunity progress to a more technical or creative role later down the line – I like to be able to promote internally!

Our core competencies cover value creation, people development and business operation.

How will I know If I could fit in?

The dynamic at the GadgetPlex is extremely friendly, supportive and approachable. One of the things I love most about our team is how well everyone works together, to support one another and offer advice and help with anything. There’s always a positive, rosy glow around the office thanks for the most part to the people themselves. SEOgadget is a challenging and rewarding environment if you’re the right person, so be prepared to be happy to share, be forthcoming with ideas and experiments, be focused and clear on delivering your best.

Skills wise, you’d be a most attractive candidate if you have learned a skill recently that you now use really well. I’m more interested in people who can tell me that they got so interested in something, they went off, learned a lot of new skills and now, they can do something great. That could be anything, not just technical – writing, creative, design, development, computing, sport! Be prepared for the question: “what have you learned recently, and what have you done with your new knowledge?”.

A Vibrant and Fun Social Culture

The photo on the top left was sent to me as I had to miss a Beer O’ Clock (thanks guys), and just this Saturday I was mostly nursing a hangover because Hannah bought in a load of slippery nipples on the company tab on an impromptu celebration on Friday night. Ouch!

In the past 6 months we’ve been karting, been on comedy club nights out and eaten our own bodyweight in Nandos. You get your birthday off work, but if you happen to be in on your birthday, usually a massive cake seems to appear.

What do I have to do to apply?

Fill out this form as best you can, and we’ll be in touch with you. It might help to learn more about us first (if you’re a new comer to our site!) so why not take a look at:

SEOgadget on Twitter and Google+, check out some recent presentations and conference session write ups, some of our clients and what we do. Reading some of the more popular posts on our blog would really give you a great feel for the level of working processes you’d be developing.

 Image source: Kaptain Kobold

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Google’s war on spam has left quite an impact on the SEO industry of late, with last week’s Penguin update leaving swathes of web masters taken totally by surprise, running to the forums to make their complaints. While “white hat” SEO can start to look smug, innocent bystanders have been caught in the cross fire.

Let’s imagine you’re one of those people. What are you supposed to do? Back at the GadgetPlex we discussed a series of options, some based on experience, some based on observation on specific penalised sites and some, in need of experimentation. Often the conclusion we’ve been coming to on the *experimental* ideas are to do the test and see what works. The thing is, the Penguin update doesn’t just raise the link quality threshold. At least not from some observations we’ve made.

In no particular order are the next steps an impacted site could take.

Review Your Site for the Other Problems

In a situation like Penguin, it’s very easy for SEO’s to panic, and head straight to their inbound link data. Don’t be too narrow in your focus, as Rishi pointed out. A few weeks before Penguin, Google sent out “manually generated” unnatural link warnings via Google Webmaster Tools took out a few link networks, including buildmyrank.com. I think that round of changes left a lot of SEO’s in the mindset that all updates since then (Panda 3.5 update on the 19th April excused), must have been about links.

The cryptic warning on “over-optimisation” came from Matt Cutts at SXSW back in March, where he talked about keywords on a page, link exchanges and “what a normal person would expect in a particular area”. Read into that what you like, today I read that statement as “site optimisation levels that are way beyond the norm in a given range of results”. Quite how this might be measured is an interesting conversation to have, but one I’ll save for the bar.

Google’s update announcement mentions “keyword stuffing” more than once, as well as the more obvious mentions of link schemes. When was the last time you saw a site ranking well because of keyword stuffing? I think that there were refinements to signals used to detect more recent interpretations of on-page spam. I’m basing that opinion on recent experience.

This brings me on to a domain that came on my radar as a casualty of the update. Most of the links were nothing to get excited about – reasonably natural stuff, though there were links that if you were looking at the metrics, you might want to get them removed. However, there were some interesting additional characteristics to this site namely:

- Almost all of the content was duplicated elsewhere
- There were groups of pages where the variations in copy were very difficult to see, aside from the titles
- The body copy used inline CSS to set the text the same colour as the background (with a slow loading image to appear later between the text and the background)
- Google preview showed the home page to have no actual content above the fold, just a blank space
- The site was painfully slow

Some of those characteristics should have been called out by Panda forever ago, but weren’t. The page layout update should have caught the blank space, but it didn’t. Setting your text the same colour as the background using inline styles? Uhm.

What combination of on-site issues might have triggered this penalty is guesswork. What is very interesting is the fact that there is a feasible combination of items that could be considered spammy. Why these features weren’t picked off by previous updates is equally mysterious.

My advice, don’t just focus on your backlinks. If it’s time for a spring clean in your technical SEO strategy, go ahead and do it. If you’ve had development changes for SEO queued up after the Panda update,  now would be a really good time to get them done. If you know that content is duplicated elsewhere or just plain in need of a rewrite, get it done.

Remove All the Bad Links

Here’s the SEO nirvana: A domain with a nice clean link profile with site wides kept to a minimum and lots of brand centric anchor text variation from genuine, editorially awarded links. How often do you see that?

Let’s assume for a moment that any link metrics exist that definitively help us differentiate what truly makes for a “toxic” link. You’ve identified them, categorised them and used lots of spiffy tools to get your data sorted. How much work is it going to take to remove them? And how? We use ODeskers, a lot of data collection and a lot of outreach to get the job done, but it’s tough going.

Ultimately, link unbuilding is time lost to proper inbound marketing, and there are links that are pretty much impossible to remove. Occasionally you strike lucky by finding a group of inbound links owned by the same network (I managed to get ~2000 directory links removed after discovering the contact details of the site’s network owner via ARIN.

Realign and Mix Up Your Inbound Anchor Text

Have you been over cooking your anchor text links? Perhaps you’ve got lots of site wide links using highly targeted terms. You’ll be able to see the sitewide linking domains easily in Webmaster Tools and I’d suggest using a tool like Open Site Explorer or our anchor text analysis tool to work out if there might be an “unnatural” linking pattern. If you have any ability to contact the sites that are linking to you with a view to realigning the links to something more branded, I would say that’s a very worthy use of your time. We recently removed a lot of sitewides for a new client – turns out they’d been paying for them unnecessarily. Guess what? No ranking change after they were removed. Saved them thousands of pounds a month.

Review Where You’re Linking to

Are you linking to low quality, low trust sites, or linking out to sites that may have been penalised for selling links or domains buried deep in spammy blog networks? Then by association, your own trust levels may be quite low. We’ve known for a long time that links to obvious affiliate networks don’t do you any good, but since Penguin, it might be wise to really review how and where your site links out. You can use IIS SEO Toolkit, Screaming Frog or Xenu to grab all of your linked-to external links. From there it’s relatively easy to analyse the data in SEO Tools for Excel - low trust, spammy outbound links should be considered for removal.

Submit a Re-consideration Request

The last response I saw to a re-inclusion request submitted after the link quality warnings were sent out made it clear the quality analyst felt not enough had been done to deserve re-consideration. Woops.

The advice on filing a reconsideration request is pretty clear, be transparent and report all of your activity, explain what you’ve done to rectify the situation and supply a comprehensive list of links for review. There’s no point trying to hide details if you’re at this stage, Google will probably catch you out and ignore your future requests.

Penguin affected sites don’t receive a warning in Google Webmaster tools, though if you’re certain you’ve acted in a complete and thorough manner to rectify the problems causing the penalty, this is a reasonable course of action.

Start with a New Domain and Realign the Links You Built

For huge sites, obviously this isn’t an option. But what if you’re say, a smaller affiliate site with 500 or so linking root domains? If you’ve been using a link building CRM like Buzzstream and you have all of your linking contacts in a data base, you could consider realigning your good links and starting again. This is a very last resort approach, and I suspect you’d want to take into account a few caveats:

- Launch the new site entirely independently of the old one (host IP, WHOIS, new content)
- Don’t link the two sites together
- Don’t  301, we don’t know how the penalty is carried across at this stage
- Don’t cross domain canonical unless you have a safe testing ground to validate that the penalty is not transferred (again, don’t know at this stage)
- Don’t associate the sites via GWMT and Analytics
- Assume you’ll need to submit “updates” to any linking text in old guest posts

I’ve worked with sites that have pulled epic linkbuilding tasks out of nowhere and ranked (or re-ranked) well after 6 months. I’d be interested to hear what the community thinks of this idea (*ducks*).

Experiment With a  New Sub-domain

We took on a client (affiliate site) after they’d got hit badly by Panda. As a test, we created a set of new pages on a subdomain targeting a group of competing keywords and they ranked perfectly well for the terms the main domain had been hit for. The cool thing about subdomains is that you can put test pages up to see what happens. In this particular case, the original pages were 301 redirected to the new subdomain pages and rank in similar positions to the original pages before the Panda update that affected them.

On that note, you could experiment with new pages “cleaned” via 301 or rel=”canonical” (and you should experiment!) but I really don’t think that recovering your rankings that way is going to be the right way to go.

Don’t Panic, Consider Your Options Carefully

Every time I see a site owner suffer temporary ranking problems, they have a tendency to panic and start changing everything. That’s not a good way to start. Right now my best opinion is try and gather a full and complete view of the situation. Identify issues that you know will be causing problems, be them links based or technical. Distribute the tasks and effect change. Going to Google as your first port of call is probably not the wise choice, unless you absolutely feel that you have been wronged by Penguin. If that’s the case, here’s the link to the form. Good luck with that.

So Your Site’s Been Penalised? Now What? is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

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By now, you have probably heard nothing but the fact that content – content marketing, content development, and content strategy – must be a part of your online marketing strategy. And there are many, many good reasons for that. In today’s post, we’re going to look at all of the reasons that you should start implementing content into your online marketing strategy. These reasons include but also go beyond just SEO.

Content Makes Panda Happy

Panda is a hungry bear, ready to gobble up any sites with low quality content. It’s been over a year since Google released the Panda update into the wild, taking down sites with huge losses in keyword rankings. One well-known site to get hit with the update was EzineArticles – they lost a huge amount of their keyword rankings as shown in this graph by SEMrush.

What you may note is that EzineArticles has still not managed to recover their rankings. One site that has seemingly recovered is HubPages.

They did it by separating weak content from the main domain by establishing subdomains for HubPages writers and content.

The lesson you can take away from studying these two sites is that low quality content will make you target for future Panda updates. Panda updates didn’t stop with the one in February of 2011 – according to SEOmoz’s Algorithm Change timeline, Panda has evolved from 1.0 to 3.4, last updated in March of 2012. The only thing that will save your website is removing your low quality content and replacing it with higher quality content.

Content Makes Link Building Easier

As someone who has requested links for a variety of different websites in different industries, there was one thing that was a sight for sore eyes in any link building project – a website with great content. It was always a challenge to build links to the homepage of an unknown retailer or to a boring product or service page. It was rarely a challenge to build links to pages with interesting content.

When you have useful content and resources on your website, you are bound to find others who are willing to link to it. Some ideas for various industries include…

• Calculators – Getting an anchor text link to a boring home loan provider can be a challenge. Getting a link to a useful home loan calculator, on the other hand, is much simpler. It’s a tool that you can convince almost anyone to add to a home buyer’s resource page (unless they are a direct competitor).
• Infographics – Well-designed infographics are a gem for any industry and for link building. If you can find relevant blogs, they are usually happy to share your informative infographic with their niche audience. And, if nothing else, you can always submit them to infographics directories and blogs that have high domain authority and PageRank to boot! Plus there’s always the chance that someone at Mashable will take a liking to your infographic and start the viral sharing.
• Videos – There are probably hundreds, if not thousands of “As Seen on TV” products that you never have and never will hear of. But one product you may not have missed is the Slap Chop, a little food chopper. The website for it has about 20 links, 1,000 likes, and 190 tweets. The official video for it, on the other hand, has over 500 links, 44,000 likes, and 55,000 tweets. And that doesn’t include the parody or remix videos. This means a simple little product received a whole lot of online marketing thanks to an entertaining commercial that went viral.
• Lists – Love them or hate them, lists get the job done and attract lots of links. On one site that I contribute to regularly, the post that has the most links is The Entrepreneur’s Handbook: 101 Resources for First Time Entrepreneurs.

Need more ideas? Try this inforgraphic from Copyblogger and the BlueGlass infographic team.

Content is More Likely to Be Shared

Besides just link attraction, great content is also likely to receive lots of shares on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. The latter is particularly important as Google+ results might show up in search results for people connected to the Google+ user who shares the link to the content. For example, can you imagine being on the first page of search results for a search on Yahoo? This Google+ post was, thanks to relevancy and timing, with a link to the post on Google+ and the actual blog post itself.

So be sure that you don’t just create content, but you encourage social sharing for that content by adding social share buttons. You can get the official ones from Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ or use plugins like ShareThis or AddThis.

If you don’t believe that social sharing is important, consider this. One of the ways you build links is by making people aware that a piece of content exist. Encouraging the social sharing of content will make even more people aware of that content which will almost always lead to more links to that content.

Content Helps Brands Build Authority

Whenever you read a good book on a topic, you tend to believe that the person who wrote it is an expert or authority on that topic. Producing content online helps professionals and brands become publishers. It allows them to go beyond just another name in search results and become a leading authority in their industry. Some great ways to take advantage of content marketing as a way to establish authority includes the following.

• Publishing great content on your official blog.
• Offering great content to be published on other top blogs in your industry.
• Writing articles for major publications (newspapers, magazines, etc.) in your region or industry.
• Contributing to crowdsourced posts and books in your industry.

By creating content to be published on your website and beyond, you will demonstrate your expertise to your current audience and gain more exposure to bring in a new audience.

Content Can Help Your Customers

Do you find yourself (or your customer service department) answering the same questions over and over again? If so, you might want to consider publishing blog posts, reports, or even eBooks to cover those topics and offer them on your website for your customers. These could be product manuals, tutorials, or even a easily searchable FAQ database. Customers that like to be self-sufficient will greatly appreciate the ability to get the information without having to contact you by phone, and your customer service department will greatly appreciate having more time to deal with higher-level issues than being overwhelmed with the same simple questions.

Content Can Be Repackaged & Repurposed

Last, but not least, most content can be repackaged and repurposed to further increase its exposure. Some great ways to do this include the following.

• Take your blog post content, have someone read it, and turn the recording into a podcast.
• Take data from a well-researched post or case study and turn it into an infographic.
• Take sections of your infographic and turn it into a slideshow.
• Take your slideshow and convert it to video.
• Record webinars onto video, and transcribe what is said throughout the webinar to make it into a blog post.
• Take a collection of several blog posts that have a similar them, combine them, and turn them into a report or eBook that you can giveaway in exchange for mailing list subscribers.
• Take eBook content, divide it up into logical parts, and turn it into an autoresponder series such as “7 Days to ____” for mailing list subscribers.

There are many, many different ways to repackage your content and use it to gain more exposure and entice readers to become potential clients. The possibilities are endless and only require some time and editing!

What other reasons do you have for incorporating content marketing into your online marketing strategy?

Image credit: OpenSource.com

6 Reasons Why Content is a Must for Online Marketing is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

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For years one of the key ingredients of successful link building campaigns has been anchor text optimisation. Anchor text or the actual words that get used to link to another page or site have been among the most important ranking factors. Indeed optimised anchor texts have been so crucial that many people focused too much on them.

Some wide spread search engine spam tactics have been motivated by the will to pass anchor text.

Lately, as expected by many in the SEO industry Google has been tweaking the algorithm to weed out possible anchor text spam tactics. We don’t know exactly how they did it but there are a several common sense ideas floating around that explain how faulty anchor texts might get targeted.

*

Anchor text is not just a simple signal from each and every link. Your whole backlink profile will get analysed to find out whether your anchor text distribution is natural or artificially inflated by over-zealous SEO practicioners. How can you influence your anchor text in a manner that still works in 2012?

Do we have to stop anchor text optimisation in 2012 altogether? Does Google discount optimised anchor text now? Well, most probably not. Anchor text is still a valuable way of improving both user experience and search engine positioning. Why?

Well, just consider the most popular old school type of anchor text: “click here”. It might sound good and even actionable but take a look at this list of links:

1. click here
2. click here
3. click here

Here it’s obvious that the anchor text is useless. So anchor texts can’t get ignored completely, neither by humans nor search engines.

How to manage anchor text when link building

There are three key ingredients you need to be able to garner natural looking links while actually building links hands on.

You need:

1. variation
2. branding
3. natural links

Variation

When you build links yourself as in contacting webmasters to link to you, submitting to directories or guest blogging you tend to use the same anchor texts over and over. You just copy and paste the biography or just slightly change the directory entry. Google may consider these repetitive links duplicates or in the worst “unnatural links”.

So you need to add variation. You can’t always rewrite or write everything anew, that would be a waste of time and energy. What you can do though is provide a bit of variation depending on the context and circumstances. Some examples of variation are listed below. Let’s assume that we optimise for the keyphrase [SEO agency]. The anchor text is in [brackets].

• Use synonyms – [SEO agency] may get replaced with SEO company] or [SEO firm].
• Use plural/singular forms – SEOgadget is one of the most advanced [SEO agencies]
• Use keyword modifiers – As above: [advanced SEO agency] or [London SEO agency] or [SEO agency UK]
• Switch keywords in keyphrases – Check out one of the main services of our [agency: SEO].
• Combine keywords – [SEO agency and Internet marketing company]
• Use natural language (e.g. stop words) – [We're an SEO agency]
• Don’t use site-wide links – Do not link with the same anchor text on dozens, hundreds or thousands of pages from one site.
• Link to one URL with different anchor texts – Make sure to add link other relevant keywords as well, for example [SEO services] in our case.

Branding

Branding has over the years become one of the most important ranking signals for Google to sort out the cesspool as Eric Schmidt put it as Google CEO. So over the years it become more an more important to act as a brand, be it name brand like Ford is one or create a personal brand like I did for myself as Tad Chef. The more people link to you as a brand the better it seems. At least as long you have some optimised anchor texts as well to rank for your keywords too. So it’s about finding the best middle ground. You need all of the links below:

• brand only – [SEOgadget]
• added brand – [SEO agency SEOgadget]
• misspelled brand [SEO Gedgat]
• personal brand – [Tad Chef]
• personal + name brand [Tad Chef of SEOgadget]

Natural links

Natural links are quite rare these days. Still many links you build can be natural to some extent. Natural means not optimised by you in this case. It’s easy to build natural links in that sense that you don’t have to give exact instructions on how your link has to look like to those who will put them on their sites. You just “forget” to send them the preferred anchor text and people will come up with creative ways to link to you. See some examples of typical natural links you want to have as well:

• “click here” – [click here] or [go] or [link] etc.
• URLs – [www.seogadget.co.uk]
• misspellings – [seoagency]
• whole sentences [This SEO agency is so cool I actually froze during the meeting!]
• nofollow links – In real life many link are “nofollow” that is not counting for Google. Google can see them though and they count for your link profile as a whole. In case you don’t have any at all you’re suspicious just the same as having too many of them.

How to influence anchor text while getting links

The best strategy of link building is to actually getting the links while passively sitting around. OK, it’s not that simple. You have to create the obligatory “great content” and make people link to you in the way you’d like to. How do you achieve this when unable to contact every person who links to you? Also often not people but aggregators link to you automatically. There are several on page elements that usually influence the outcome. people an bots tend to use a select few page elements for their anchor text.

• title tag – Include the anchor text in your title tag but try to sound self-explanatory and not entirely generic otherwise many people won’t use it. Especially keyword-stuffed title tags rarely get used in their entirety.
• URL path – Make sure to include the keyword in your URL path. seogadget.co.uk/blog/anchor-text-optimisation could be the solution for this post. Don’t make it too short or too long though. /anchor-text by itself may be a bit too broad while the whole post headline is too long for a clean URL. Many automated tools link to URLs but also some lazy people like myself.
• h1 tag – While some people take the title tag others prefer the first headline aka h1 or whatever tag you use for the most important headline on the page. So do not only focus on puns here. Include the keywords as well.
• brand – You see, SEOgadget already has the keyword SEO in the brand itself. This surely helps, especially in cases where the brand is SEO.com
• name – People link to people not websites. Some really do it literally. So they will link [Tad Chef] as the anchor text. That’s not bad as noted above thus provide a visible name as anonymous content without an author gets trusted less and thus also less linked out to.

Anchor text tools

Many SEO tools do offer some insights into anchor texts. On the other hand there aren’t many tools that exclusively focus on anchor text. Thus I’d like only to recommend a few tools here everybody can work with.

• Open Site Explorer – Open Site Explorer by our buddies from SEOmoz shows anchor texts along other link metrics. You can see the top 5 for the free edition or 10 if you’re logged in. For more you need a paid membership.
• SEOgadget Anchor Text Tool – Our own anchor text tools uses Open Site Explorer data but organises in a way that focuses on the anchor text distribution. It’s great to see why a particular page ranks for a keyword at a glance.
• Keyword Combinations tool – This is actually a simple tool intended for keyword research but you can also use it to inspire some variation of your anchor texts.

Anchor text resources

Anchor texts are in some sense the secret sauce of SEO. There are some myths surrounding them. These resources are a must read but make sure to do your own tests and not blindly believe what they say.

• All About Anchor Text – Whiteboard Friday | SEOmoz
• 301 Redirects Can Pass Anchor Text | The Google Cache
• SEO 2.0 | Google Filters: Exact Match Anchor Text Links Are the New Meta Keywords
• Beyond Exact Match Anchor Text To Next Generation Link Signals – Whiteboard Friday | SEOmoz
• 5 things that stop anchor text being passed

* Creative Common image by man’s pic.

Link Building: Anchor Text Optimisation Best Practices in 2012 is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

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Last week I saw Will presenting on technical issues associated with SEO. One of the key issues he presented on was site speed. Specifically, the cost of ignoring site speed as a performance and revenue indicator. Will’s own experiences of Distilled’s performance issues (mostly resolved by implementing Cloudflare) were a stark reminder of the importance of building at least a basic knowledge of CDN (content delivery network) implementation.

Why bother with site speed?

Because it costs money not to. A nicely summarised roundup by SmartInsights reported on research showing a dramatic decline in conversion as page load times increases to 4 seconds:

We already know there’s a strong business benefit to improving site speed, it’s possible to see figures as high as 1% conversion rate loss for every second in site speed squandered. I presented at a large retailer network company head office on Thursday, comparing the time to render taken by a search result page at Google, Amazon’s home page and their flagship retail site:

Assuming a directly proportional relationship between page load and conversion rate, the potential gain for this site is obvious.

How does a CDN work?

Put simply, a CDN caches all of the objects on your site (for instance; images, JS files and CSS files) and serves them from a location that is usually closer to the request location. This should mean that visitors see a faster page load. By hosting all of your static files on a CDN, it’s fair to assume there’ll be a perceived increase in page load, especially in locations far from your own hosting (assuming the CDN has good coverage there).

I wanted to learn about CDN implementation, so I opened an account with MaxCDN. SEOgadget’s static files are now being served from “cdn2.seogadget.co.uk”.

The end to end set-up process should have taken around 10 minutes. There was a little complication owing to SEOgadget being an SSL site, but I’m pleased to note that MAXcdn will work with your own SSL certificate, provided that you have a wildcard certification that will certify any subdomain (for example: *.seogadget.co.uk).

How to configure WordPress with a CDN

Firstly, open an account with your CDN provider of choice. In MAXcdn, create a new “pull zone”:

You can name the zone anything you like, in our case, “SEOg”. Set the “origin server URL” name to match your domain name and enter your intended custom CDN domain (the location from which your static files will be. Don’t worry, you don’t have to do anything with DNS just yet:

After you’ve created your new pull zone, you’ll see this message:

Take a note of the two domains, your custom domain (cdn.yourdomain.co.uk and the pull zone location generated by MAXcdn – seog.seogadget.netdna-cdn.com). Now head to your DNS control panel:

(This assumes you’re using CPanel to manage your domain a, cname and MX records via your web host. We use TSOhost’s nameservers and SEOgadget has been hosted with them for a long time. If you’re not using CPanel, you’ll have to follow slightly different steps to get to the DNS zone editor at your registrar - it’s very easy though, so don’t be put off if this is new):

Select “Advanced DNS Zone Editor” and the domain you’d like to edit, here:

Protip: Yoast uses more than one CDN address serving JS and CSS separately. This (I think) has the benefit of asynchronous downloading of those files.

Configure MAXcdn with W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is our caching plugin of choice. It’s easy to use, fast and reliable. What’s most powerful about the plugin is compatibility with several well known CDN service providers. Here’s how to set it up with MAXcdn very quickly:

Firstly, select “NETDNA / MaxCDN”. Don’t enable just yet, just click “Save all settings”. Next, head to the CDN configuration from the options along the top of the settings page.

You’ll see a space for your CNAME, so complete that and fetch the API key from MaxCDN here:

As soon as you’re done, click “Save all settings” and select “Test NetDNA” to make sure all is well. The outcome should look like this:

This makes a great weekend project – give it a go!

I quite enjoyed getting SEOgadget set up with a proper CDN. The process is not without its pitfalls – especially if you happen to use SSL to serve your content. Still, with a little perserverence and background reading, it becomes relatively simple (and extremely interesting). The main limitation I faced were problems related to multiple subdomain names (cdn.*, cdn2.*, etc) because of the SSL certificate. We have a wildcard certificate that wasn’t validating easily in the MaxCDN interface. To save time and hassle I elected to creating a separate certificate which was fine for one subdomain but not for multiple addresses.

The performance panel provided is initially very interesting. We’re now serving the US far more locally, (so I might expect our latency to be vastly improved in the US) but, we’re serving the UK and all of Europe from Amsterdam. I suspect that overall performance won’t be improved much in the UK. My initial tests certainly make me feel the improvement locally is marginal, but still improved.

I used Pingdom tools to evaluate overall object loads and got some initially interesting results from New York, with one exception to the observation that we appear quite a lot quicker:

Initial data is almost irrelevant though, so I’ll be watching Google Analytics (site speed report, segmented by country) for a reduction in page loads from our main traffic generating sources over the next few weeks. I’m hoping for an improvement across the board, and certainly no increases in the UK:

I’ve set up a basic alert in Google Analytics to inform me when there’s a week on week decrease in page load – it’s not terribly granular, so we’ll see what happens:

A few useful sources

I’d like to recomend you take a look at these (extremely useful) blog posts:

http://rackerhacker.com/2010/02/13/wordpress-w3-total-cache-maxcdn/

http://devilsworkshop.org/maxcdn-setup-on-wordpress-using-w3-total-cache-plugin-wpmu-tutorial/

http://yoast.com/articles/cdn-wordpress-maxcdn/

http://support.netdna.com/knowledgebase/installing-custom-ssl/

Image credit: Yi Shiang

Setting Up a WordPress CDN (Content Delivery Networks) for Beginners is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

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I can’t tell you how often I have to create embed HTML for images such as infographics. Just to save a little time, I thought I’d put together a little embed code generator based on Gravity Forms:

It’s actually very simple, but then again I guess the best things in life are. I hope it saves you time and if there’s a feature you find useful, drop a comment below.

Here’s the link: https://seogadget.co.uk/embed-code-generator/

Generate Infographic Embed Codes Quickly and Easily with this Tool is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

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• High Quality Web Design Showcases, News & Infographics Submission Sites
• Link Evaluation Survey 2012 [INFOGRAPHIC]
• Link Building: Anchor Text Optimisation Best Practices in 2012

Links, seemingly the currency of rankings, and a white-hot area right now what with all the recent de-indexing of certain link networks, GWT Warning messages being sent to over 700,000 webmasters and the ever decreasing effectiveness of low-rent link building tactics.

So just what is a “good link”? We know what we look for in a link for our clients but we wanted to survey as many members of the SEO community as we could to get a real idea of the kinds of methods and metrics that SEO professionals all over the globe are using to assess the quality of a link.

What do we look for in a (link) partner?

We analyse a prospective linking partner for our clients based on three different areas:

• The strength of a link – despite the shifts in link building practices, it is vital to assess a link from a strength point of view. This means utilising one or several or your preferred metrics, for us this is PageRank, mozRank and domain authority.
• The quality of a site – just what is a high-quality website? We assess a website based on the overall user experience and the apparent policies of the website being evaluated. This includes things like a suitable number of adverts relative to content, well-written and well-constructed pages, and ensuring the website doesn’t appear to be overtly flogging its sidebars or footers.
• The relevance of that website – some argue that the relevant link is a myth but we are still keen advocates of links making sense from a user’s perspective and that is the key to relevance. Obviously in some industries it is near on impossible to get links from directly relevant websites (unless you’re talking about the SEO community where knowledge, links and interactions flow freely between competing businesses!) because they are in the same industry and often are unwilling to link. This is why we look for natural crossovers between industries and topics to help extend the reach of our clients.

Show me the results

We opened the survey and saw just over 500 individuals complete it – thank you to everyone that took part and hopefully you’ll find this data interesting.

Link Evaluation Survey 2012 infographic By Orange Line SEO

If you like this Infographic, you can embed it on your own blog or website using the code below:

Link Evaluation Survey 2012 [INFOGRAPHIC] is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

Many webmasters have been left scared after Matt Cutts announced an upcoming “over-optimisation” update and/or penalty. People all over the world are now scrambling to clean up their acts while others consider giving up SEO altogether out of pure fear. Some SEO experts have dismissed the fear as irrational, while others tried to explain what the update might be about.

It’s difficult to find a proper definition of what “over-optimisation” is, it sounds like an oxymoron, as usually you can’t over-optimise something. Optimisation is a synonym of improvement. Can you improve your website too much? No, it’s rather about a few common SEO tricks that have plagued the Web for years by now.

Luckily Matt Cutts already has given us a few hints what he has in mind and what the Google engineers are currently working on.

In this post I’d like to explain what Google most probably considers over-optimisation. In the second step I will attempt to suggest long term SEO strategies that will make you immune to this over-optimisation update and future updates of this sort.

Risky SEO tricks Cutts mentioned include:

Keyword stuffing

For years misguided webmasters and even some SEO experts have been using so called “keyword density” to measure site optimisation. According to the keyword density logic the more frequently a keyword is mentioned on a page, the better.

Keyword density is a remnant from the ancient past of SEO. It stems from a time before Google, when search engines used to judge website relevance mainly based on the actual number of keyword instances occurring on a page. When Google appeared on the Web, the game changed. From then on, links became the crucial factor. Still to this day, keywords do have to be mentioned on a page in order to make them relevant to the query but keyword density is a completely irrelevant metric.

Of course, you can’t not mention the actual thing you write about. Still, many people still assume that mentioning a term more often will improve their search engine rankings. Google has been been penalising overtly keyword-stuffed pages for years. Even last year’s Panda update targeted this SEO trick.

So how can Google step up their efforts here? It could be page titles for example. Many websites only feature keywords and keyphrases there to this day. In contrast natural language or whole sentences are used by journalists or average Joe webmasters who don’t overdo SEO.

Link exchanges

For years link exchange or simply swapping links has been one of the most popular link building tactics. I link to you so that you link to me. Of course this tactic went over the top and Google had to act. The search engine did repeatably discounted so called reciprocal links and automated link networks among others. People came up with so called three way link exchanges and similar techniques to overcome the penalties but reciprocal links haven’t been as popular since then.

Still link exchanges remained one of many standard link building techniques many people, especially average webmasters have used over the years. Some sites still rank with such links.

So what can Google do about it that hasn’t been done yet? Google can enhance its bias towards brand signals. Exchanged links are in many cases unnatural to use Google’s own term. Either they look unnatural by themselves as they use exact match anchor text, or the way they appear on the Web looks suspicious. When you add too many links in a short period of time it can seem unnatural as well.

Brands in contrast get links all the time, whenever someone refers to them and the people linking to them rarely use optimised anchor texts. Just think about it, when you write about Amazon, do you link the word Amazon or do you use “auction”, “auctions” or “auction deals” to link to it?

SEO issues Cutts probably has also in mind:

• anchor text
• unnatural link profiles

What is considered not over-optimised and thus runs no risk of a penalty? “Great content” on a “great site”. This is as superficial as it can get. Sadly Google still does not disclose their ranking factors unlike competitor Blekko,where you can look them up right below the search results. So we can only guess on what Google considers to be great content or a great site based on the past explanations given or SEO tests run.

What you can do in order to stay on top of the game despite recurring updates?

Think about people not search engines. Google is always trying to mimic searchers. So you should mimic search users as well not Google who is only mimicking them. Think about humans first and then consider the current ways in which search engines in general or Google in particular attempts to fulfill their wishes.

Over-optimisation always happens when you think about search spiders first and search engine users second or even forget the actual users.

Combine your SEO efforts with CRO (conversion optimisation) and user experience design. Make sure that the people who arrive at your site from search do find what they seek. Landing page optimisation, AB testing and user testing make your sites usable for humans almost as a side-effect so that any dreaded over-optimisation will be cleaned during the process. Readable copy, white space, usable forms, to the point descriptions and striking calls to action are some of the main elements for a successful conversion oriented website.

Consider user intent and ideally provide content and solutions for all three common user intents: navigational, informational, transactional. Make sure your users find exactly the what they need as expressed in the search query. Make sure they find enough background information on it by providing a glossary, an FAQ and other educational content. Make sure they find the product or service or a link to a matching product or service. Old school SEO often ended at the moment when the user clicked on the search result which led to “over-optimised” sites.

Optimise your site as if Google didn’t exist. Make sure all your visitors, direct visitors, social media visitors or referrals do find what they need. Try user personas and traffic segmentation to offer each audience what they are after. The returning visitor wants to know what’s new. The casual social media visitor wants to know why s/he should come back next time. The visitor coming from a referring site wants to find exactly what the other sites suggested s/he will find.

Write for social media users not just searchers. Most search users expect to find the keyword they entered into the search box on the page. They ignore fluff and hyperbole and focus solely on the keyword. Social media users are often different. They don’t look for a particular result they have on their mind. They are after the inspiration, something they don’t know yet so they can’t even search for it. Some bloggers add adjectives like “awesome” just to make social media users notice their articles. Find the middle ground between the SEO friendly and human readable enticing writing and do not just reduce title tags and file names to keywords.

Recent industry articles on the upcoming over-optimisation update:

• Google’s Pending Algorithm Update to Penalize Over-Optimized Content
• Too Much SEO? Google’s Working On An “Over-Optimization” Penalty For That
• Is An Over-Optimization Penalty Coming For You?
• Over-Optimization vs Optimization
• Over Optimization Penalty Speculation
• POV on Google’s “Over-Optimization” Update
• Google’s “Trust Us” Penalty
• Over-Optimized? Google Announces New Penalty for Too Much SEO

Are you afraid of the over-optimisation penalty? Do you care? Do we have to beware of the upcoming update or just keep calm and keep on doing SEO as usual? Please share your opinion in the comment section!

Images courtesy of the Blind Five Year Old and Bart Heird

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I’m tired of this conversation:

“We’ve been working with an SEO agency for about 6 months now. We ranked quite well for a few weeks, and then the rankings dropped. We don’t know what they do, exactly, but they send us 4 directory links and 2 article submssions a month. Oh, and they do a PR release for us, once a month”

It’s a starting point in a sales discussion I experience all too often. It’s often a precursor to the part of the conversation where we discover the business is being bled dry by a more-than-substandard SEO product that is completely ineffective and alarmingly expensive. No rankings, gone. No traffic. And, still paying! In some cases being told to pay more!

Crapola. Of the weapons grade kind.

Wil got frustrated with Google, specifically how they make liars out of the good guys. We’ve all done our tests, and, in the past, experienced SEO’s would tell you exactly what types of linkbuilding and SEO practices would (and still might) work. That’s fine – if you’re looking to generate a fast buck on a throwaway domain then I have no issues with that – it can be lucrative, fun and a challenging learning curve. Eventually Google will catch you, and you’ll move on. Noone loses.

If you’re that SEO agency, I don’t know how you can feel good about what you do. If you’re an ordinary, everyday on-line business, and that discussion feels weirdly familiar, fire that SEO company.

Stuff like this does not wash:

Neither does this:

Wait, what?!

It seems that Google are beginning a new wave of attacks on spammy linkbuilding practices, and I’m personally pleased to see it. There, I said it.

Detecting bad link-building practices – it’s extremely easy

Tom Anthony wrote a long post on detecting bad link activity with SEOmoz’s metrics. That’s a reasonable methodology to profile back links according to SEOmoz metrics, but if you really need to weed out the bad stuff, I recommend getting back to the old school and adding Domain PageRank to the mix. Niel’s SEO Tools have a =GooglePageRank function, which works really nicely for backlink weeding:

Which can lead to this with a simple pivot table:

Here’s what I did to make that table (excuse the voice over, I have a *slight* cold):

Please, think about where your links are coming from

Anyway – rant over, I suppose. Bad link building makes our whole industry look bad. Don’t help perpetuate it by casually brushing your due diligence aside. You’ll end up paying to reverse the damage being caused in the long run.

Image credit: Diana Parkhouse

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I bet by now you have heard the great news: The SEO industry has a new niche social community: Inbound.org

This time it’s not just the SEO industry though. The desired audience (as a pacifist I don’t “target” people) is much broader now. It’s the private side project of two very prominent entrepreneurs everybody knows who has been into SEO for a while, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz and Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot.

As you probably know Hubspot is dealing with much more than just SEO. They call it inbound marketing and it contains many of the disciplines SEOgadget specializes in as well. As of now the new community is populated largely by SEO practicioners it seems. I have participated for more than two months know and it’s apparent. The SEO people outnumber the other marketers. This is OK but it also brings a great responsibility with it.

It’s important to nourish the community first before you use it for “traffic generation” and such.

I’ve seen social news sites, whether niche or not, rise and fall in the past. There were a few reasons for failure. Some of the issues are already visible on Inbound as well. Thus I’d like to show my fellow SEO specialists other ways to approach the nascent niche community.

Always remember that participating in a social news community is a marathon not a sprint.

It doesn’t matter that you get some quick traffic from it once or twice. Also social news is not like social networking. It’s a special kind of social sites. So what are the actual use cases you can and should engage in on Inbound.org? How can you do it?

Get Traffic

You already can get around 300 visitors with a popular story on top of Inbound.org – Former search marketing community Sphinn could bring you around 1000 visitors in its hey days. So Inbound.org is already going strong. 300 might not sound much but it’s the movers and shakers who visit Inbound. It’s “quality traffic” in other words. These people are your industry peers and beyond. It’s obvious that you want them to visit your site or blog after all they are already interested in SEO and similar topics. Wait a minute though. Consider the other opportunities. Business people who do not consider themselves to be part of the SEO industry yet should consider them as well.

How to: It’s easy to get traffic on a community like Inbound. Just write something like the “what top SEO experts say about x”, make sure some of the people mentioned are on Inbound and you’re already in. Sharing a submission with you network might help as well. Just one vote other than the submitter’s is enough to appear on the frontpage. Then you have to be just relevant and other people will vote as well. Make sure you submit during daytime both in the US and UK. Otherwise your post might get overlooked.

Example: http://inbound.org/content/2012/02/content-chemistry-the-periodic-table-of-content/

See also the screenshot from Google Analytics above.

Build Authority

While getting traffic from Inbound.org may be a quick win to go after you don’t have to a social scientist to grasp that there is more to get from a niche community beyond that. I’ve been new to SEO once as well. Then in 2007 I have been new to the international SEO community as well. With sites like Sphinn I was able to build authority within the industry. After Sphinn has been disassembled part by part that opportunity vanished. Of course you could take part in SEO forums discussions or guest post on SEO blogs but a working niche social community is a fast track to recognition in an industry.

How to: Submit great articles from elsewhere first. Make sure only to submit stuff others care about and consider being of high quality. Ideally some regulars will start wondering who you are and start checking out your profile. Ideally they visit your blog then and submit one of your posts. Otherwise people will just remember your avatar and once everybody knows you and trusts you they will vote your won stories from your site as well. There are three URLs that get obviously more attention than others, SEOmoz itself, Distilled which is closely associated with SEOmoz and KISS Metrics. Being the first to submit those means getting more karma points. On the other hand it doesn’t mean your judgement or skill level is high enough to spot the gems.

You won’t get authority by submitting just the stuff that’s obviously popular. That’s not the way such communities work. People may even get angry at you for “stealing” the submission. So make sure you research stories yourself before submitting the usual suspects. Karma does not equal authority. So make sure not only to go after the number of karma points.

Debate

One of the key ingredients of a lively community is the debate going on there. This is perhaps the single most important one. Just think about sites like Reddit or Hacker News.  Inbound.org is a bit different though. You can only vote up comments, voting down is not possible, only flagging. Flagging is for obvious abuse not just for disagreeing. On other sites the main stream opinion always wins. You might be right but as long as everybody else does not share your background and beliefs you lose. On Inbound.org you join the debate in order to find out what’s best for you and your clients. It’s not just a way to express beliefs and get applause from those who are part of the same demographic as you.

How to: Some postings are fit for debate others are not. A Forbes article on how branding is better than SEO is a great place to start a debate. It’s not important that the article is right or wrong. You share or vote it up to make sure the broad spectrum of opinions gets mentioned. There is truth in every opinion. Otherwise there would be no need to have it and it would die out. The purpose of a good debate is to uncover it and make sure that other people who aren’t as advanced as you are on that subject matter can review and compare them to find out what they deem right or not at the end.

So don’t start a debate on posts everybody has to agree with. Many people comment on such posts saying things like “great post” etc. That’s not debate. That’s redundant. You may get a bit of karma but that’s not a debate. A successful debate is either one where either you can reinforce your knowledge or the others have convinced you that what you knew until now was wrong. That’s why I sometimes upvote both sides of the argument. I don’t care whether I’m right or wrong. The debate in the comment section is completing the post itself. On some blogs critical comments get deleted. A place like Inbound enables the community to really debate issue.

Example: http://inbound.org/seo/2012/02/seo-needs-an-antihero/

Educate Yourself

For me the most obvious use case of Inbound.org is to learn. After many years of SEO practice I am advanced when it comes to some aspects of my know-how. Others, like conversion optimization, user experience or entrepreneurship are still new to me though. This seems to be a use cases many SEO practicioners overlook on Inbound. I see lots of SEO articles with known techniques voted up by the dozens while submissions dealing with the other aspects get only a bunch of votes.

A niche community is truly about the niche, even the niche within the niche. So you don’t only need to read half a dozen of link building posts. To me the most intriguing ones are those I have no clue about yet. That’s why I voted up most submissions about Pinterest. It’s not about the hype. It’s about educating yourself and finding out what you don’t know yet.

How to: The front page is already dominated by good old SEO topics and the publications associated with SEOmoz. Look deeper than just the top posts on the front page. Most importantly visit the categories. They are hidden under the archives link at the bottom. Or you can click the category each post is categorized in to find more resources on that topic. Do nut just look for the popular posts there, check out those you know less about.

Dispel Myths

Ideally only “true” posting get popular on social media but we all know that they don’t. Search for [seo] on Topsy and you see that some of the most popular posts about SEO on Twitter are rants and jokes, not the resources. SEO is dead all over again every year, at least twice. The good thing about a niche social site is that you can dispel myths like that without having to share the post in question again and thus making it even more popular. Repeating myths doesn’t make them go away. So the next time someone sells crap advice on social media make sure to submit it to Inbound.org – not because you agree with it but because you want experts to speak out about it.

How to: Submit it and share the Inbound URL instead of the original one on Twitter etc. Make sure to comment below to express your disagreement with the post.

Mingle with Industry Top Dogs

I’ve noted above already that Rand Fishkin and Dharmesh Shah are behind the project. Danny Sullivan also is an avid user. The others may not be as prominent but most of them are influencers and publishers. In short, these people are linkerati.

By providing quality resources these people may notice you, even follow you on Twitter, Google+ or Facebook to get more of your curated wisdom or intriguing writings. I have followed many people on Google+ where I am mostly active recently just because they are on Inbound.org- One reason for this was that someone has created a Google circle with the top 50 Inbound users and shared it. I have also manually added other users to my circles.

I may be not as influential as those mentioned above but like many other bloggers and curators who are active on Inbound, the likes of

• AJ Kohn
• Jason Acidre
• Jon Cooper
• Gianluca Fiorelli
• Wayne Barker
• Aleyda Solis

are looking all the time for the next person to link to or even interview.

How to: Just look at what Jon Cooper does. This is an amazing kid. He’s not even half as old as I am but he rocks the SEO industry already. He does on Inbound as well. I bet I am not the only one to vote his stories up again and again. Looking at this kid I always think they teach SEO, social media and blogging in school nowadays. How else can you be so savvy at such an early age? He indeed performs so well that it seemed to me at first that Point Blank SEO, his site is run by a company with dozens of employees.

Jon doesn’t submit his won blog all the time. The others do. They probably know from Twitter and other channels. Point Blank SEO is one of the most popular sites on Inbound. He even managed to interview Rand Fishkin himself.

Example: http://inbound.org/seo/2012/02/link-building-strategies-the-complete-list/

Find your Tribe

While admiring your industry icons is a thing many people do it won’t pay your bills in the long run. What you need is to socialize with your peers and find your tribe. This is a strategy you can follow even in case you just want to get hired by an SEO agency. Whatever your goals are you have to focus on your peers and band together.  Other bloggers or social media users who share the same interests but do not yet have celebrity status can support you in the future. It’s a give and take but not just barter as in exchanging links. I have been sharing links by other people for years and most of the people you share links of notice sooner or later unless they already have hundreds of others that do so.

How to:  Do not just focus on SEOmoz and Search Engine Land when sharing links. There is at least one story each day you might want to share from those but when you do you risk to omit the dark horses. Check out blogs via RSS you like to read but where the bloggers aren’t the household names yet. Not everybody wants to be popular.

Some people are perfectly fine with being important in their area or niche. These people are often not even competing with you for attention. Submit their stuff and they may submit your stuff next time. In case they don’t , no problem, you like them anyways and their writings are good enough by itself to be submitted. Don’t just submit to endear yourself to somebody. After a while those who you support will become your friends naturally. Some of the people I have “met” on Sphinn five years ago are still my most ardent supporters.

Expand Your Social Circle

While searching for your tribe you will find lots of new like-minded people on Inbound you share a lot of interests with. These may not become your best friends but I already could gain lots of insights from them. Especially those who weren’t on your radar yet are often an enrichment of your daily dose of inspiration. Fresh voices and unexpected views are always great for creativity. Next time you create flagship content the things they have contributed might inspire you the most.

How to: Do not just heck out submission from the people you know already. In contrast focus on those you haven’t seen yet elsewhere. Just think about it. Do you always order the same drink at a bar? Why not try something new. It’s about opening your mind to more influences. Expanding your social circle is easily done on a social news site that focuses on one set of topics. The choice is limited and thus easier.

Get Peer Review

One of the things I missed most about Sphinn was the peer review. Everything can get popular on social networking sites like Facebook or Google+. Google+ even pushes sexist jokes itself. A niche community is for peer review though. People won’t only clap their hands and say “thank you great posts” like bot commenters on blogs. When they want to add something, question your assumptions or dismiss your opinions altogether. It’s always great. It might feel bad at first when everybody disagrees with you or just a few. I had people accusing me of trolling just because I pointed out a mistake in their strategy.

Next time you will remember your mistake and improve your strategy though. You will remember what the others said any you will try to add it your strategy. You will look out an do not repeat the mistake again. You won’t blog about it. People might not even tell you on your blog. They just will think that the blog is low quality and not come back. On a niche social news site like Inbound you can get free peer review by experts. Sometimes it’s worth much more than the simple upvote. Getting feedback from your peer, being it appreciation or criticism can have a positive long term impact on your career. I’ve learned a lot this way in the past.

How to: Why you or someone else submits your story just listen and do not accuse critical commentators of “not understanding” you and your post. Do not just repeat your points over and over. Listen and adapt. Update your posting. Do more research. Admit your mistakes. This is just plain old common sense but many people are too proud to do so and consider negative feedback to be some kind of attack.

Example: http://inbound.org/seo/2012/02/why-wikipedia-is-top-on-google-the-seo-truth-no-one-wants-to-hear-e/

These use cases are not just for SEO specialists.

Entpreneurs of all kinds can submit their case studies of SEO failure and success and get traffic and feedback in the best case.

I’ve seen posts on how business get popular on Pinterest on Inboud or how going after social media sites was more successful than SEO. You are welcome to post them.

Also you will surely find even more ways to contribute and profit from Inbound.org – It’s the place to be for all those who want to succeed on the Web using legitimate techniques, whether it’s SEO or inbound marketing. Give it a try and tell my what you think in the comment section.

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> Please give me the tool now!

Way back in September we released the first version of our content strategy tool, and due to popular demand and awesome feedback I’m excited to be releasing an even hotter version of the tool! This blog post takes a quick look at some of the cool new features in this latest update.

Since the launch of the first version of the tool, there have been numerous updates across a number of websites forcing the xpath to return a null value, or to change the value returned. The first part of this update restores values for any empty fields, and reformats a number of elements of the tool for a cleaner, more digestible appearance.

More Insight from Google Insights

We all know how useful and powerful Google Insights can be for identifying trends and finding out what is ‘hot’ right now to provide you with the ability to spot opportunities to create new content.

Both sets of data for ‘Top Searches’ and ‘Rising Searches’ can now be found within the content tool:

Find out what’s growing in popularity relating to your niche, pop the keyword/phrase into the content tool and be inspired for a unique angle on a hot topic!

Taking the next step…

“I’ve been playing with the tool, and came up with an awesome content idea but now what?”

In the previous version of the tool there was a sheet called ‘Source and Place’, which featured a breakdown from Topsy of experts relating to your specified keyword to help find potential content placement opportunities. With this in mind, the newest feature of the tool takes this process to another level with the help of followerwonk.

We want to track down bloggers and editors who we can potentially get in touch with, that may be interested in our awesome new content idea. The tool now automatically scans twitter bios for mentions of ‘blog’ (blogger) and ‘editor’ + your specified keyword(s), to return highly relevant outreach contacts for the idea you’ve just come up with!

The data returned for each user can be broken down as follows:

• Twitter name
• Real name
• Location
• Influence
• Number of tweets
• The number of people they are following
• Number of followers
• Age of account
• Website URL

Find editorial and blogger contacts

Oh, I also forgot to mention that the tool pulls in 50 results for both editorial and blogger contacts, so that’s 100 potential new outreach contacts right there, on top of the outreach data found via Topsy!

Getting started

1. Access the tool here
2. Log in to your Google account
3. File > Make a Copy
4. Enter keyword into cell ‘B3’ and hit return (for multiple keywords please use the ‘+’ operator e.g. london+hotels)

I really hope you enjoy the new features of the tool. I look forward to hearing your feedback. PS. If you have any problems accessing the tool please drop me a comment below or hit me up at @dbseo.

Featured image credit:
kennymatic

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Today I presented a link building session at Think Visibility in Leeds, quite possibly my favourite conference! My attitude towards link building is that it involves hard graft, intuition, and imagination; I wanted to look into these aspects and see what lessons can be learnt from the world of sales and business. After all, what we’re doing is working hard to ‘make stuff happen’ – something that successful entrepreneurs and business people are great at.

The session covered my link building process right from researching opportunities through to getting your pitch right and maximising your success rate. Within the presentation I mentioned quite a few resources that I’ve found particularly useful when link building; see the links at the end for your viewing pleasure!

As per usual, any questions just let me know in the comments!

Link Building Lessons from Swiss Toni – Think Visibility

Resources

Google Docs Scrapers

_{https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AirDJzKdcf0RdFdhWEc0ZjN1a3F2dWI2anc0TW1STHc}

_{https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AirDJzKdcf0RdFQzMUkxdEN0T0I2UDJ6Y0FWZ2sxTmc}

_{https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AirDJzKdcf0RdFQzMUkxdEN0T0I2UDJ6Y0FWZ2sxTmc}

Useful Plugins

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-links/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/similarweb-sites-recommendatio/

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Earlier today I gave a presentation at SES London 2012 with Ron Jones from Symetri on the topic of advanced keyword modelling for keyword research. While Ron gave the theoretical overview of the concepts a good researcher might use to understand and categorise how users search, I gave a practical demonstration using SEO Tools for Excel and the Adwords API Extension.

I also gave a preview of a new tool we’re testing to help keyword researchers predict keywords for the fresh index. More on that later, because it’s buggy as hell at the moment and I’d like to save it for launch when it’s ready.

Check back later for the video, because with some luck I’ll have managed to record my part of the session.

Advanced Keyword Modelling – SES 2012

Here’s the video:

If you’d like to hear about my updates on this post, follow me on Twitter.

A few useful resources:

- SEO Tools for Excel

- Adwords API Extension

- Using Keyword Categories in Excel

Video Transcription

Hi everybody. Earlier on today I gave a presentation with Ron Jones at Symmetry all about advance key modelling, specifically how to use data to make decisions about your SEO strategy, site architecture, that kind of thing. Ron talked about some of the principles behind keyword categorisation and using categories to design and architect a better website, while I took more of a practical viewpoint and actually showed how to create keyword categories and how to do some basic to advanced Excel, actually, to help solve problems in understanding how people search. I’m going to switch to Microsoft Excel and just give you a run through of what I demonstrated earlier on today.

Okay. So thank you to Zack at Prezzybox for always letting us use a little bit of retail based data in our keyword research examples. We’ve got a few things. So we’ve got some search engine ranking data here, which I’ll explain why we’ve got that in a moment. We’ve also got analytics data from an anonymous time period, but very retail birthday based. Then we’ve got some raw Google search volume data.

So, one of the biggest challenges with keyword research is being able to actually categorise this raw data into something meaningful. Ron was arguing that if you create a keyword category that’s relevant to a specific area, like if you’re in automotive, then you might want to understand what the most popular car makes and models are, or what colours do people prefer when they’re buying a car. When it’s retail, it might be that somebody is interested in outdoor toys, but which outdoor toys? Using categorisation in that regard in SEO helps us structure a website more meaningfully. But getting to that structure is a bit of a journey because, as you can see, this is relatively meaningless. We’ve got local search volumes, great. So we know that 74,000 people searched for the word chocolate last month in theUK. But so what? And that’s what this presentation is about.

So I’m going to show you how to create a keyword category and I’m going to go one step further and show you how to visualise that category. Then I’m just going to show you a few other things that AdWords API extension for Excel does. If you’re not familiar with our AdWords API extension, in as short a demo as possible, it does this. You’ve got a keyword, and I might want to get the AdWords average search volume for that keyword. This will default toUKexact, I believe. So pressing Return and running that formula will get me the total number of searches in theUKfor that term. That’s how the extension works. When we’re looking at this data here, this is an export of the Google AdWords API using the array formula. So you can find out how to install that on our website.

Let me just make this data a little bit simpler, and we’ll just delete that out. Let’s just imagine for a moment that we want to create a category, and for the purposes of this demo, I’m going to show you how to create a category to help us understand a little bit more about how people search for birthday gifts in retail.

Now to do that, we need to be able to create the category. If you head to SEOmoz or Google SEOmoz keyword categories, you’ll see a post on how this is done. Here’s the practical example. I’m just going to grab my formula and go back to Google search data. So, imagine for a moment that in any category there might be markers or strings that describe the fact that the keyword itself belongs to that category. So if you’re optimising for occasions, you might be interested in Christmas or you might be interested in Valentine’s, right? So that might create a category called occasions. Price, it might be cheap, it might be discount, might be sale and so on. Each of these types of keywords might belong in a phrase that would indicate that a user’s search is based around price. Similarly, if somebody’s searching for a gift for an 18th birthday present, you’d see the characters “1, 8, t, and h” appear in the string. So, that’s basically how categorisation works, and it’s really down to us just to find a formula that will allow us to filter by all of these keywords, all in one go.

That formula is called an array formula and here’s how it works. If we go back to our search data, I’m going to paste in the formula that I copied a moment ago and I’m going to just grab, from my keywords type list, that row of birthday strings. Let’s call them markers. So we’re going to highlight all of those, and then pressing F4 will anchor that range. Now if I do a CTRL-Shift and Enter to make it an array formula, it’s started to filter. Now I’m going to just neaten that up a little bit by saying “Birthday,” and in my formula I believe that it’s looking at “O” not “C.” So it’s actually fetching the column header here and saying whether or not it’s found that marker in the keyword. Let’s say CTRL-Shift and Enter again, and there we go. So now I can filter the keywords that might be related to birthdays. So, that’s pretty cool, and that’s the first part of the demo.

The next thing that I wanted to show the audience was, okay, we know how many people are searching for those keywords, but how many entries did we get? That’s relatively simple because we’ve got some basic analytics data here, and we’re going to use what’s called the VLookup. Now VLookup simply says, “Find me this value in another place in my spreadsheet, like another keyword, and fetch the data that’s adjacent to it.” And you specify how many columns to the right in VLookup you want data to be fetched.

So, back to my Google search data. We’re going to create a VLookup. Now for those of you familiar with tables, you might have noticed that I’ve named my table, and I’ve named it “Analytics,” which makes it nice and simple when I’m forming the VLookup. Column index was two, was the column next to the keywords, and I want to match exactly. I found an extra bracket there, there we go. Let’s call that “Analytics.” Now we’ve got analytics entries, local search volume, and the keyword.

The last thing that I might want to combine with this is search ranking. Now in my ranking table, let’s just call this “Rankings Data.” Notice that we’ve got the keyword and then one, two, three, four, five columns to the right. So, the VLookup needs to look a little bit like this. Double click the table name when it appears in the tool tip. It was column index number five, and we want to match exactly with the zero, and off it goes to fetch those rankings. Now, you might have just noticed that some of those are errors. That’s because there is no data in this case. So we can wrap our query, our formula inside an IFError. So, IFError, do this thing, basically. So the value of IFError might be no data. There we go. Cool.

So, the last part of this is, well, how do we visualise this data? How do we make it into something that is relatively actionable, and quite often I like to just create a pivot table, which I’ll show you really quickly. So, if you go to insert pivot table, add that to a new spreadsheet, drop my keywords at the bottom, we’ll want our local search volume, we’ll also want our rankings. We always need to make sure that our ranking is set to sum in this case. I want to be able to filter by search volume and filter by rankings and, of course, the keyword category that I’ve made up.

So, now I’ve got my local search volume. Show me all keywords where search volume is higher than 46. I might want to sort by largest to smallest, like so. Only show me keywords that rank on page two. So let’s select some low hanging fruit terms that we might want to target with a bit of SEO, some link building, or maybe improve the on-page optimisation of our website. Finally, only show me keywords that are related to our birthday category.

So there we go. We’ve got an interesting data set from which we can visualise with a chart. So I’m just going to insert a bar chart. Now, we’ve got two sets of data here – the rankings and the search volume. Now, the rankings really need to go on a separate axis. So we can do that by formatting our rankings. We’re going to format that selection. We’re going to put it on a secondary axis. Then we’re going to change the chart type with a right mouse button click, change series chart type to dots. Now the next thing I want to do is reverse my axis, because I want to see the top ranking keywords at the top and the bottom ranking keywords at the bottom. And values in reverse order, click close. Then the only final thing that we need to do is if we format that data series, let’s take that line out because the line is irrelevant. The data isn’t technically joined. There we go. It’s a very, very simple chart that shows, on the right-hand side, rankings from position 1 to position 30, our keywords along the bottom with local search volume.

So that’s how you visualise your keyword priorities. You could use this data to make some decisions about your site architecture. In what order should you be linking to things, what content should be on your home page versus content that perhaps can just link to a little deeper because it’s not quite as high a priority.

In the session, I also covered a couple of other bits and pieces, because the brief for the session was actually to show how I might expand keywords. I just wanted to share a tip, which is based on the AdWords API plug-in and how to generate a keyword list based on a particular geo-location. So, in this case, we’re looking at keywords related to the word “hotels.” I’m very interested in how people search for keywords related to hotels in foreign climes. So let’s look atTaiwan. This is a query called “=arraysGetAdWordsIdeas.” It’s part of the AdWords API toolkit. While that’s running, I’ll explain what its doing. It’s looking at a table called Root4, fetching that keyword, and then playing back an exact match search volume for all keywords that are related to the word “hotel” according to the Google AdWords API Suggestion Service. You’ll see here that’s the country code forTaiwan. I’m asking it to show me all search volumes on the Web, and I’m asking for 100 keyword ideas. That will go quite high, around about 800 to 1000 per API call, and because it’s the API call, it is actually one API call. So that’s only $0.25, sorry, I beg your pardon, it’s only $0.25 for every 1000 API calls. So in theory you could have 800,000 keywords for $0.25, which is pretty cool.

This is something else that I shared, which is Ubersuggest. If you’re just trying to expand a keyword list, head to Ubersuggest and get the HTML link for your own search results. So, you’ve got here the query for cats. Now if I just grab this XPathOnURL query, which is courtesy of Niels Bosma’s SEO tools, the XPathOnURL query, which you saw in the previous video, if I go and select a range and press F2, then paste my query in which is referencing the URL in A3, which is the Ubersuggest URL, if I make this an array formula with CTRL-Shift and Enter, it’ll go off to Ubersuggest and fetch all of the results on that page, eventually. It takes a moment. So it should just be coming any moment now. There you go. So there are the top keywords related to the word “cats” according to Ubersuggest with setting toUKsearch, which is immensely powerful if you think about how you can combine that with your search volume data.

Anyway, thanks a lot for listening. That’s the end of the presentation. You can watch this video, or you can go and download the presentation by following that bitly link. Thanks a lot.

Image: PSD

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While preparing myself for an SEO conference presentation, I like to practice to make sure I can fit in what I have to say, or in this case; show. Speaking on the SES London 2012 “SEO Tools of the Trade” panel, I gave  up a few interesting Excel tips using SEO Tools for Excel and the Adwords API extension. Here are the guides:

- SEO Tools for Excel

- Check your Sitemap for Errors with Excel

- Fun With The SEOmoz API – Get Links Data Straight into Excel

- Adwords API Extension

Video: Excel Tips and Tricks

Excusing the occasional hesitation, I hope you find this video useful. I’ll update this post with my slide deck after the session. Enjoy!

Image credit: Lynn Friedman

Here’s the presentation

Tools of the Trade: Excel Tips from Richard at SES London 2012 is one of our latest posts from SEOgadget - thanks for reading! Want to stay up to date with the latest SEO and Conversion Rate Optimisation tips and tricks? Follow us on Twitter and Add SEOgadget to your Google Circles!

Today, I want to share a tip for quickly weeding out errors in sitemap XML files. This post will teach your a few new Excel tricks and (hopefully) save you some time in your own technical SEO audit projects.

Why a nice clean sitemap?

Google have invested a lot of time and effort into improving the sitemaps functionality in Webmaster Tools and the advice I’ve always heard from Google people is advice like; keep your sitemaps as error free as you can, use the correct canonical URL. I’ve always felt that a sitemap file with a very low load time is also advisable if you can speed up the dynamic elements of the file generation.

Bing’s Duane Forrester was on a Whiteboard Friday talking about exactly this topic back in March last year. His comments about sitemap cleanliness were of particular interest:

We have a very tight threshold on how clean your sitemap needs to be. When people are learning about how to build sitemaps, it’s really critical that they understand that this isn’t something that you do once and forget about. This is an ongoing maintenance item, and it has a big impact on how Bing views your website. What we want is end state URLs and we want hyper-clean. We want only a couple of percentage points of error.

Duane Forrester

If you’ve not seen the video, I recommend taking a few moments to review what’s said:

Checking for problems during a site audit

When I’m working on a site, I sometimes need to work out what state the XML sitemap is in. If I know there’s been a recent update to the file(s) it’s not always a good idea to totally rely on the data coming from Webmaster tools. If you’re ever in that situation, here’s how to get a fresher impression of the state of your sitemap.xml file.

Import your XML sitemap file into Excel

Firstly, head to Data > From Other Sources, and select the “From XML Data Import”:

In the “File name” dialogue, type or paste in your sitemap XML file URL:

Click “Yes” when this dialogue appears:

And eventually, your entire XML sitemap appears, all nicely formatted in Excel:

Fetch the HTTP status code for each URL

Back in the old days, the quickest way to check the server header response of a list of URLs was to crawl the list with XENU on 0 crawl depth, and then VLOOKUP against the original list. Thanks to Niels Bosma and his SEO Tools for Excel, this process is much, much quicker.

Just create a new column and insert the following query into the first cell:

=HtmlStatus([@[ns1:loc]])

Check that the canonical in the page header matches the declared URL in the sitemap

Aside from a rarely updated sitemap, the other common mistake i encounter is non-canonical URL submission in the sitemap file. The URL in the sitemap and the URL described in rel=”canonical” don’t match!

=HtmlCanonical([@[ns1:loc]])

Check out the “Match?” column – we’re checking to see if the canonical declared in the web page’s header matches the actual URL in the sitemap. Oh my, it’s a simple formula:

=EXACT([@[ns1:loc]],[@Canonical])

Learn this stuff

Learn this stuff! If you’re not familiar with some of the tips in the post – that’s ok, I more or less have to relearn the more complicated stuff every time I start a new task with Excel. It’s enormously satisfying to make the time to teach yourself new tricks and Excel is brilliantly simple once you have the gist of it. Here are some resources to get you started:

• Using Tables in Excel
• How to Use VLOOKUP
• How to Make a Pivot Table in Excel
• How to Find Orphaned Pages in Excel
• How to Extract Your Competitor’s Keyword Strategy
• HTTP Status Reports with Xenu, OSE and VLOOKUP
• What are My Most Linked to Subfolders
• Categorise Your Links with Excel
• Keyword Research wiith Categories

Image: Splorp

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People love to be asked their opinion. Chance are, if you’ve been to a restaurant recently, you’ve been given a receipt asking you to rate your experience via survey. Or if you’ve stayed at a hotel, you’ve received an email survey to rate your stay. Surveys are a great way to determine user satisfaction with your products, services, and websites. The following are some great ways to use online surveys and a look at the survey tools available.

Great Ways to Use Survey Tools

If you are an online marketer or SEO, then you should consider the following uses for online surveys.

Prospective Client Surveys

Before getting started with a new client, you might want to get to know them first by providing a simple online survey form for them to fill out. Some great questions you could ask include the following.

• What websites do you own? (main domain, blog, additional sub-domains)
• What social media profiles do you use? (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+)
• What local search profiles have you claimed? (Google Places, Yahoo Local, Yelp)
• Have you worked with another online marketing or SEO agency? If yes, what services did you use? What were the results?
• Will you be working with more than one online marketing or SEO agency simultaneously?
• What are the top 10 pages you would like your online marketing strategy to be focused upon?
• Do you have any special online tools that could be used to attract links? (online calculators, widgets, industry-specific database)
• What are your online marketing goals?
• Do you use Google Analytics? If yes, can we have access?

Basically, ask them about anything you think you will need for your campaign so you know what you are working with early on.

Client Satisfaction Surveys

Client satisfaction surveys can be very useful not only to find out if you are on the right track with your client’s online marketing campaign, but also to find out if you can expand your services with them. So instead of just asking if they are happy with their results so far, if they are receiving enough communication about their campaign, and so forth, you can also ask them if they are interested in additional services they are not taking advantage of.

To keep your survey fresh from month to month, you can also ask about specific new trends. For example, this month would be a great time to ask your clients if they would be interested in mounting a campaign on Pinterest and optimizing their site with images so it will be Pinterest friendly.

Website Usability

If part of your online marketing involves creating or optimizing websites for conversion, some basic website usability testing might be required. Invite people to try out the website, then send them a survey about their likes and dislikes of the website’s functionality. You might learn about a particular pain point that others experience which you might not have even thought about.

Link Bait

Whether you are creating link bait for a client or for your own website, survey tools can help. One of the top trends in blogging is crowdsourced posts – posts where you get various people in a specific niche or industry to answer one or more questions, then compile the answers into a blog post. Not only do you get a lot of great information, but you get the promotional power of everyone you include in the list sharing it with their audience.

5 Top Survey Tools

The following are some great survey tools that will allow you to get the answers you need. The best part – they all offer free basic membership!

Google Docs Forms

Google Docs offers their own survey tool with their Forms application. Simply log in to your Google Account, go to Google Docs, and create a new Form. You can choose text based answers, multiple choice, list answers, and more, making answers required when necessary. You can also choose from almost 100 pre-designed themes. You can embed forms onto your website using iframe code, share the link to the form, or email the form directly from Google Docs. Return to the form within Google Docs to see survey results!

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a widely recognized survey provider. They allow you to create surveys from scratch or choose from over 60 templates for different categories and industries including the following for customer feedback.

• Website Feedback
• Business to Business
• Customer Satisfaction
• Customer Service
• Software Evaluation

Their account options range from free for 10 questions & 100 responses per survey to $65 (US) per month for unlimited questions & responses, customizable survey forms, and more features.

KISSinsights

KISSinsights allows you to add customer feedback directly to your website with easy, targeted questions that will pop up on your site. It is the perfect way to do quick usability testing with your website’s visitors! Plans range from free for surveys with up to 30 responses to $49 (US) per month for customizable surveys with an unlimited number of responses.

Zoomerang

Zoomerang is on eof the best survey tools for feedback. Surveys can be sent via email, Facebook, Twitter, or your own website. Zoomerang offers a variety of different types of surveys including the following.

• Customer Satisfaction
• Business
• Marketing
• Market Research
• Meeting & Event Planning
• Social Media (Twitter & Facebook)
• Mobile SMS

Plans range from free for an unlimited number of surveys with up to ten questions and responses to $599 per year for unlimited surveys, questions, and responses, customization, data export, and more.

Smart Survey

Smart-Survey offers affordable software which you can use for customer satisfaction, specific industries, employee opinions, training feedback, and more. They allow you to cancel at any time, or simply downgrade your account and upgrade when you need it without losing your survey data. Plans range from free for an unlimited number of surveys with up to 50 responses per month to £29.99 (UK) per month for unlimited surveys with up to 1,000 responses per month, custom themes, and more.

Do you use survey tools to learn more about prospective clients, customer satisfaction, or website usability? Have you had success with crowdsourced posts? Please share your tools & tips in the comments!

Image credit: The Bees

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