Account structure 

In the Facebook Ads hierarchy, ‘account’ is the highest-level object. Every account is associated with a specific user’s Facebook account. Campaigns are the second tier that sit under the account level. Unlike in Google Adwords where ads are held within ad groups, campaigns hold ads within Facebook. It’s at the campaign level that daily budgets are assigned. Each campaign can hold any number of ads. Every ad is self-contained, including targeting elements, ad creative, bids, and time-scales. There is no requirement for ads in any campaign to be related in any way. However, it’s best practice to tightly theme each campaign with relevant and similar ads as it would make reporting and managing budgets so much easier.

Step 1 – get your target demographic right

Begin by making a list of demographic segments you want to target or make sure you are clear about who your client wants you to target. It’s always handy to ask your client to describe exactly who their target consumer is. This should be your first step in setting up your Facebook advertising campaign.

E.g. targeting list:

• Females, age 18-30, who like Kim Kardashian and live in Orlando.
• Males, age 25 and older, engaged or in a relationship, and interested in weddings or honeymooning.

Step 2: create your ads

Facebook has no process to save ads without submitting them for editorial approval. This is one of the greatest weaknesses to the user interface and the ad creation process and is a serious pain the rear. Therefore, it’s most efficient to submit one version of an ad for each social segment for approval at the time of research. It would be a complete waste of time if all your ad variants didn’t pass editorial scrutiny. Once the draft ads are approved, you’ll be able to tweak, duplicate and build ad variations and resubmit.

Step 3: designate the landing page

If the landing page has not already been determined, designate or create a page that is relevant to the draft copy. It’s extremely important to make sure the landing page is relevant for two reasons:

1) Facebook editorial might reject ads that take users to pages that aren’t relevant.

2) You would see a very high bounce rate, which means your time, effort, and money will be wasted.

Therefore, I cannot stress enough the importance of a great landing page. It’s often best to create specific landing pages solely for PPC campaigns. Trust me, the investment in development time will yield higher return on investment and provide a more effective PPC campaign.

Step 4: create your ad copy

The ad title, image, and body need to be reasonably related to pass editorial review. Again, choosing relevant images and writing compelling ad copy are critical to receiving higher click through rates.

Step 5: define your customer

This is the fun part. Use all the targeting attributes to fully target your social demographic segment.

Step 6: select your campaign

If you’re creating your ads on the web interface, click on “create a new campaign” and make sure you either change your budget to “lifetime budget” or change your daily budget to £1.00. This will ensure you don’t overspend your budget mistakenly. I’ve had to keep stressing myself to make these changes as I have had to endure some painful lessons in the past.

Step 7: set your bid and place your order

Once the demographic targeting is done, set your bid to £0.01. You set the bid so low because there’s no way to pause ads until after you’ve placed your order. Placing your bid at £0.01 will almost guarantee your ads won’t display and spend your valuable budget.

Step 8: repeat above steps

Once you’ve completed the above steps, find the little green button at the top right hand corner of the page that reads “create an ad” and click it. Go through the above steps until you have a paused campaign with an ad for each segment in it. Hopefully none of your ads will be rejected. If they do, all you need to do is make the recommended changes and resubmit them.

Getting the account structure right

Now that you’ve got a basic structure in place, let’s discuss best practice campaign lay-out. Most clients want to test more than one ad’s creative to the same target audience. While it’s tempting to dump a lot of ads targeting various segments in one campaign bucket, the result can be a big mess. Unfortunately Facebook does not currently allow you to sort results by demographic group. So you can’t isolate performance of ads by gender, education, interest or other criteria with a few clicks. This needs to be done manually, so setting things up with a bit of foresight goes a long way.

Example 1: messy structure

• Baseball campaign:

• baseball bat ad
• baseball ad
• baseball glove ad
• baseball glove ad 2
• baseball shirt ad
• baseball shirt ad 2

• Basketball campaign:

• basketball ad
• basketball ad 2
• basketball trainers ad
• basketball trainers ad 2

• Football campaign:

• football boots ad
• football boots ad 2
• football ad

The problem with the above structure is that Facebook’s algorithm decides which ads in your campaign are served. I suspect the algorithm is more optimised for Facebook to maximise its profits than for you to get coverage across all your ads equally. Because Facebook automatically rotates through each active ad in a campaign, it’s really important that the algorithm is comparing apples to apples.

Example 2 : better structure

• Baseball bat campaign -

• baseball bat ad
• baseball bat ad 2

• Baseball campaign -

• baseball ad
• baseball ad 2

• Baseball glove campaign -

• baseball glove ad
• baseball glove ad 2

• Baseball shirt campaign -

• baseball shirt ad
• baseball shirt ad 2

• Basketball campaign -

• basketball ad
• basketball ad 2

• Basketball trainers campaign -

• basketball trainers ad
• basketball trainers ad 2

• Football campaign -

• football ad
• football ad 2

• Football boots campaign -

• football boots ad
• football boots ad

You could go even more granular:

• Baseball bat campaign (age 18-24)

• baseball bat ad
• baseball bat ad 2

• Baseball bat campaign (age 25-35)

• baseball bat ad
• baseball bat ad 2

• Baseball campaign (age 18-24)

• baseball ad
• baseball ad 2

• Baseball campaign (age 25-35)

• - baseball ad
• - baseball ad 2

• Baseball glove campaign (age 18-24)

• baseball glove ad
• baseball glove ad 2

• Baseball glove campaign (age 25-35)

• baseball glove ad
• baseball glove ad 2

• Baseball shirt campaign (age 18-24)

• baseball shirt ad
• baseball shirt ad 2

•  Baseball shirt campaign (age 25-35)

• baseball shirt ad
• baseball shirt ad 2

•   Basketball campaign (age 18-24)

• basketball ad
• basketball ad 2

•  Basketball campaign (age 25-35)

• basketball ad
• basketball ad 2

•  Basketball trainers campaign (age 18-24)

• basketball trainers ad
• basketball trainers ad 2

•  Basketball trainers campaign (age 25-35)

• basketball trainers ad
• basketball trainers ad 2

• Football campaign (age 18-24)

• football ad
• football ad 2

• Football campaign (age 25-35)

• football ad
• football ad 2

• Football boots campaign (age 18-24)

• football boots ad
• football boots ad 2

•  Football boots campaign (age 25-35)

• football boots ad
• football boots ad 2

The above structure will be very handy when you need to monitor performance and also to make sure your end of month reporting is fairly straightforward.

A/B Testing

I love what one of my previous bosses told me during an internship programme I was completing some time ago. He said in my role I am not allowed to hold an opinion. If I need to push something forward, I’d need to substantiate it with tangible facts. I find A/B testing a great way to substantiate my proposals and recommendations, such as which campaigns to allocate more budget to, what type of images do I want, what type of message tone works with users, which type of call-to-actions work best, what colours are users more receptive to etc. By using A/B testing, you can obtain actual numbers, which can help you in your decision-making process.

Therefore, it is extremely important that you test different headlines, switching body copy, testing different images etc. It’s important to test at least a couple of ads per campaign. But don’t overdo it with loads of ads at the same time. As mentioned above, Facebook’s not going to give each ad a true chance to perform at its best even in rotation but will skew toward an ad the algorithm perceives as successful.

What’s in a name?

The last tip is to make sure you name your campaigns logically. The last time I checked, Facebook’s web interface allows a user to sort campaigns by most columns, while power editor does not support sorting. The ‘all campaigns’ page defaults to an alphabetical sort by campaign name every single time the user returns back to ‘all campaigns’, even after another sorting column was chosen previously. This can be extremely frustrating, so planning your naming standard early on will save your heart from increased blood pressure.

There is no hard and fast rule when it comes to naming conventions, but make sure they make sense to you when sorted alphabetically and that it also makes sense to someone who will work on the account in your absence. I generally use the following format as a guide -

[promotion name]-[product name]-[duration]-[special targeting metric]

e.g. Christmas deals – Trainers – 01 Dec/05 Dec 12 – males

Conclusion

The most essential take-away from this post is to plan ahead and be organised. Unless you use an in-house account management tool or you use a third party account management tool, managing Facebook campaigns can be fairly exhaustive. Hopefully the above tips will keep you in good stead. I’m sure you have some nuggets of wisdom to share too, so please feel free to leave your comments below.

Image credit: marcopako

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 11 tips for a better Facebook ad campaign

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1. What is it?
2. How can I use it to boost my SEO campaigns?

So with adoption of the next major evolution of HTML becoming more common, and having a growing feeling that it was about to come up in more client meetings, I decided it would be a good time to check how I can potentially make the most of HTML5.

I won’t go into a whole explanation of what HTML5 is now – I will leave that for the web design blogs – but the highlights as I understand them are:

• A more descriptive set of markup tags; for example, nav, article, aside and footer
• The introduction of Canvas element could be used for rendering graphs or images dynamically without the need for browser plugins

It is apparent from this list that there are some pretty big changes between HTML4 and HTML5. For example, I’m guessing that every SEO will spot the third bullet point – video without the need for Flash – and realise the obvious content indexing benefit this will offer as a result.

But will you get any direct benefit from being first to the party (so to speak)? Will changing your site to HTML5 be a quick route to top spot in the rankings? Well, the simple answer is no! And you don’t have to just take my word for it either; Googler John Mu left the following responses to related questions on the Google Webmaster Central Help Forum:

In general, we work hard to understand as much of the web as possible, but I have a feeling that HTML5 markup is not yet as widely in use (and in use correctly) that it would make sense for us to use it as a means of understanding content better. As HTML5 gains in popularity and as we recognize specific markup elements that provide value to our indexing system, this is likely to change, but at the moment I would not assume that you would have an advantage by using HTML5 instead of older variants.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=2d4592cbb613e42c&hl=en

and

In general, our crawlers are used to not being able to parse all HTML markup – be it from broken HTML, embedded XML content or from the new HTML5 tags. Our general strategy is to wait to see how content is marked up on the web in practice and to adapt to that. If we find that more and more content uses HTML5 markup, that this markup can give us additional information, and that it doesn’t cause problems if webmasters incorrectly use it (which is always a problem in the beginning), then over time we’ll attempt to work that into our algorithms. With that in mind, I definitely wouldn’t want to stand in the way of your implementing parts of your site with HTML5, but I also wouldn’t expect to see special treatment of your content due to the HTML5 markup at the moment. HTML5 is still very much a work in progress, so it’s great to see bleeding-edge sites making use of the new possibilities.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=1d3850aec4e3dd96&hl=en

Although both of these comments date from late 2010, there doesn’t seem to have been any further opinion put forward to suggest that this is not Google’s current view, or not that I have found anyway.

So does this mean that you should ignore it all together? Well, no. This may sound odd having seen the opinions offered by Google, but there do seem to be some credible theories of the indirect benefits of implementing HTML5.

First, due to the fact that HTML5 is still a relatively “new” technology, a number of people will link to other sites that are using it. This means that an HTML5 site or piece of content (an infographic for example), if implemented well or uniquely, will accumulate links and social signals naturally. Check out this music video from Arcade Fire, which makes use of HTML5 and Google Maps to personalise the video to you. I’m not a fan of their music but I shared the link. Obviously this will only be a benefit until HTML5 becomes commonplace.

As well as this, it is believed that HTML5 will reduce the volume of code required to render a page, so it therefore has two indirect benefits. The first is that it will improve page load speed, which is a minor ranking factor, as well as having an effect on conversion. Secondly, it should increase the likelihood that information would be found by the search engine bots, as a result of them being able to process more site pages (if you believe that the search engines expend a limited amount of resources on a site).

Finally, you will be ‘future proofing’ your site. Even though Google’s current position is that it will not aid rankings, the Webmaster Tools responses imply that it may do in the future once it is more widely adopted.

When HTML5 becomes a web standard, I believe that at some point it will be worked into the algorithm as a result of its wide use. Being an early adopter means there should be an immediate boost if and when it is added to algorithm. It is also safe to assume that this change wouldn’t be publicly announced, so you will get a short competitive advantage until everyone else catches on.

Anyone who has read some of the other posts around on HTML5 and SEO are probably thinking I have missed out one of the most obvious benefits – the new markup. From what I have seen, a lot of people believe that it will indicate to the search engines what type of content is on a page and how important it is, meaning you are really able to draw attention to content.

While this may be the intention, I personally believe the ease with which this may be manipulated to promote low quality sites is such that it is likely only ever going to be a low value ranking factor, if it is one at all. It is very similar to the keywords metatag, which was so easily abused that Google finally discounted it as a ranking factor. If all you have to do is to put content within a certain tag to boost its rankings, everyone will do it.

So overall, while I personally wouldn’t recommend that a site change to HTML5 as some kind of SEO silver bullet, there are enough incidental SEO benefits to make it worthwhile to work into new builds or redesigns, or to use for content generation (such as infographics).

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Will HTML5 Boost My Rankings?

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Last week, a client flagged up to us that their site wasn’t getting Android traffic on certain posts.  True, Android traffic is never high, but when it slips to 0 visits, there must be something wrong.  When the client looked into the posts, it was evident the titles of these blog posts each had a dash (-) in them. The majority of traffic to these posts comes from Twitter via Bit.ly links.

With the help of my local Orange Shop (HTC Hero Graphite anyone?), and some rigorous testing by @spamhendricks, it can be concluded that Android is not rendering bit.ly links which have dashes in certain instances.  Specifically, when a blog post title utilises a dash, a bit.ly link won’t render on the Android platform.

Example

For example, here is an SEOptimise blog post with a dash in the title.

The URL for this blog post is:

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2012/01/did-google-just-roll-out-panda-3-2-2012-edition.html

As you can see, dashes are utilised in the URL for two reasons.  First, the dash between “roll-out” appears in the URL.  Second, all spaces in the title are also accounted for as dashes.

This link is then bit.ly-fied to appear as:

http://bit.ly/xgR9xq

If you have an Android phone, this bit.ly link will not render.

Significance

This issue is most likely to affect blog promotion across the social media sphere.  But it can also affect press release promotion, news stories, and essentially anything where a dash is included in the H1, and then promoted via the popular link shortening service of Bit.ly.

Inconsistencies

What I’m struggling to understand is why this Android rendering issue is only valid if the title of the blog post has a dash; the issue is not reflected in the URL.

This URL from the earlier example for the blog post “Did Google Just Roll-Out Panda 3.2 (2012 edition)” includes one dash in the title of the blog post.

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2012/01/did-google-just-roll-out-panda-3-2-2012-edition.html

This second URL is for the blog post without any dashes “Foursquare 2012 | Experience, Thoughts and 6 Immense Tips for Your Business”.

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2012/01/foursquare-2012-experience-thoughts-and-6-immense-tips-for-your-business.html

In this second example, the URL still utilises dashes to make up for the spaces in the post title.  And yet, in this second example the bit.ly link renders on Android platforms just fine.  Why?

What do you think?  Why does the title of the blog post equate to Android users being able to view the post or not view the post?  Is this enough reason to stop utilising bit.ly?

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Android Fails to Render URLs with Dashes Via Bit.ly

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In order to receive a 15% discount, just enter the code SEOPTIMISE012 when signing up online. There are different packages available and the prices go up after 30th March so it’s best to book early!

For coverage of previous events, please check out the presentations we have delivered and posts we have written:

• Keyword Research presentation by Kevin Gibbons – SMX London 2011
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• Top 10 SEM Tips From SMX Advanced London 2010
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© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 15% Discount Code for SMX Advanced London 2012

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Like many other people over the past few months I have been using Foursquare quite a bit, as shown below.  I have knocked up quite a few mayorships and badges, but sadly I have already found it very monotonous and not at all engaging.

To be fair, Foursquare is great at the beginning with collecting the badges, stealing mayorships, getting those “Foursquare specials” and “Sharing with your friends”.  Well the last two I did not experience; working in Paddington I would presume that businesses would be flocking with specials, but sadly not, and in terms of sharing with friends I have none (on Foursquare). With myself not experiencing two of the most important factors of Foursquare, this has sadly hindered now a relationship with the platform (for now).  In what I have found is a similar occurrence to Google+, the number of “real people” on there (and active users within the UK) is, I would imagine, not staggering.

Despite my negativity and social neglect of Foursquare as of this month, I do believe it will be a bigger issue this year amongst companies (especially SMEs and franchises) to start rolling out and using this social media platform.  Using Foursquare has really helped me in understanding why businesses should start using this social media platform and how to use it most effectively. 

Does your Business Foursquare?

If you were to ask most businesses about what social media platforms they use to market their company, I suppose you could name a few, popular ones being Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and if you are really savvy (but not really), Google+.

But how many of us have thought about using Foursquare as a marketing platform for their business?   I am going to go out on a limb and say probably less than 5% use Foursquare and to its full potential; an infographic that I saw last year outlined the number of small businesses using social media, with Foursquare not even being mentioned in the Top 7.  Even today, the fact remains that Foursquare is still not being recognised, which was exemplified when I took part in a business social media survey last night, shown below:

Shown from the screenshot, not only has Foursquare not been recognised, but what is interesting is that Google+ and Pinterest have not been included. Also, their list showed that wikis were a more of a popular option.

Should my business start using Foursquare?

As I envisage Foursquare to get bigger and better, businesses will find it particularly useful for:

• Maximising their social media efforts.
• Looking to improve their multi-channel marketing efforts.
• Digital-only brands to build upon their online reputation.
• Great way of testing new products to market.
• Source of market research to help understand their consumers better.

6 Immense Tips for Your Business to Capitalise on Foursquare

There are many ways for your business to make the best use of Foursquare and making the“Foursquare Special” better. Here are my Top 6 Tips.

1)       Make your check-ins more useful 

As exciting as check-ins are, after a while users are bound to get bored of them, so capitalise on using them better; for example, it was reported by Tnooz that the Radisson Edwardian chain of hotels were offering guests the chance to keep their rooms for longer, if they checked in via Foursquare.  The hotel chain gave guests an extra two hours in their room.

2)       Review and monitor your tips section

Be sure to monitor your tips section and understand what people are saying about your brand via Foursquare. Not only is this a great way for “free market research”, it is like having the service of a mystery shopper without the costs.

3)       Create location-based experiences

If your business has one or more location, don’t just have a standard special across all the branches. Include specific ones, for example if your business is near a seaside resort or within the city.  Have a special offer that is unique to that place to ensure they that your branch capitalises on that specific location’s resources.

4)      Capitalising on low-cost impulse items

This idea works particularly well for businesses that sell cheap items, that people buy on impulse.   Reach out to people in the surrounding area to let them know of a “free cup of coffee with a cake” or “buy one doughnut, get one free.”

5)       Marketing new/seasonal products 

Broadcasting  new/seasonal items is a great way of using the “Foursquare Special” to letting your consumers know of any new products or services available, and that they should try them out as soon as possible!

6)       Understand and review your specials

When you set up “Foursquare Special”, don’t just have one special set up and done; alternate them and see what works best for you.  For example, if you own a restaurant, don’t just have “free glass of wine for the mayor”, but alternate them – “5% off Winter menu for check-ins”, “20% off food bill for the mayor” or even “15% off total food bill on the 10^th visit.”  Play around with them to give new incentives and better engagement for the users.

2012 The Year of Foursquare (and the dragon)

With huge savings and partnerships already established in 2011 within the U.S, for example H&M, Sports Authority and Dunkin’ Donuts on board, I envisage that Foursquare will only get bigger and better for us in 2012, and be adopted as another popular social media platform to help businesses improve their sales.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Foursquare 2012 | Experience, Thoughts and 6 Immense Tips for Your Business

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1. Now nearly all Google products are covered by one privacy policy.
2. Information you give Google’s various different services can be combined.

Google still promises not to sell personal data, but to only share aggregated, non-personally identifiable information. It hasn’t announced that it’s collecting information it wasn’t before, just that it’s combining what it has differently. You can preview the new policy here.

According to Forbes, combining information between Google services has been allowed by the privacy policies since 2005. But this didn’t stop the FTC complaining of privacy policy violations when Google used data from Gmail accounts when launching Google Buzz in 2010 – Google’s policy at the time also said “If we use this [personal] information in a manner different than the purpose for which it was collected, then we will ask for your consent prior to such use.” The new policy instead says “We will ask for your consent before using information for a purpose other than those that are set out in this Privacy Policy.” Still, the FTC complaint may be a factor in why Google is trying to be very clear to its users about what it’s doing with their data, as it starts to treat all of its products as parts of a single unified service.

And now, some speculation on what this may or may not mean for PPC and SEO:

• Interest-based targeting may improve. Currently Google uses DoubleClick cookies to place users into interest categories based on the sites they visit – you can see what Google thinks you like here. The changes mean Google could infer interests from searches or Google+ activity as well, which should improve accuracy.
• Demographics targeting might be available more widely. Currently targeting by age-group and gender is only an option on sites where users supply that information. But Google’s demographic information (from YouTube or Google+ accounts) could be used for targeting on other sites as well.
• New ways of targeting Display Network advertising may appear. For example it could be possible to target people based on what Google Products they use – advertise Analytics training to Analytics users,  say, or push Google+ users to circle your Google+ page.
• New ways of targeting Google Search advertising may appear. AdCenter already allows targeting based on age-group and gender when advertising on Search: Google could do the same.
• There will be even more changes to the SERPs – Google’s announcement says the change will let them “better understand which version of Pink or Jaguar you’re searching for”. But perhaps it will also add more than help with disambiguation, adding to the personalisation of the SERPs we’re already seeing with Search Plus Your World.

Have you any idea what Google is (or could be) planning? Share your thoughts in the comments.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. What Could Google’s New Privacy Policy Mean for PPC?

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While it is apparent that Google+ is not yet fully developed, it would appear a good time for brands to set up their Google+ page, start uploading regular content and playing about with the different features on Google+. What should you as a brand be doing now?

1. Grow Your Circles

As we have seen, Google are placing more emphasis on people. People are going to share your content; they are your audience, so make sure they are interested in your market offering and develop trust with them. What can be done to grow circles? First and most importantly, the Google+1 button must be displayed on your site. This not only helps build contacts, it helps verify your site to your page. Ask employees and partners of the organisation to share the page within their circles. In the same way a brand would develop Twitter and Facebook campaigns, the same should be done on Google+. This could include giveaways, deals, offers – anything that is exclusive to Google+ will help you gain more followers. People’s pages at the moment have a higher weighting than brand pages. People need to add a page before the page can add them, so if a celebrity like Lady Gaga was to pick up your page, it could essentially drive a lot of people to your page. There is also a What’s Hot feature on Google+, so featuring on this would also increase the visibility of your page.

2. Segment Their Audience

Like in Google+ for personal pages, you can divide up your contacts into ‘friends’, ‘family’, ‘colleagues’ etc, the same can be done with your Google+ Page contacts. At the moment, a Google+ page’s circles are defined as ‘following’, ‘customers’, ‘VIPs’, and ‘team members’. This is a good place to start, and more circles can be added to further segment your audience. This provides brands with a wonderful marketing opportunity where they can target each segment with unique and specific messages. This is important, as it allows brands to develop trust with their audience… a key factor which will encourage users to share their content.

3.Develop A Content Strategy

Content creation will become more important for brands than ever before. A content strategy should take into consideration the latest Google algorithm updates, including Panda, which favours unique content that is relevant and fresh.  A regular flow of high quality content will raise your brand awareness and potentially drive traffic to your site through your Google+ page. However, the value of that content will drop if it is not ‘shareable’. Making content easy to share and to +1 will widen its reach across the internet, essentially helping that content appear in more personalised results. Having said that, creating shareable content is not always an easy task and brands will need to analyse their content and adapt it. ‘Ripples’ is a feature that will allow them to do so. It provides visual information on how content has rippled through the web. This insight could be invaluable to brands, as they are able to see who is sharing their content.

Now that Google+ allows multiple managers to log into a brand’s Google+ page, there is even more incentive for a brand to use this platform. Excluding the owner, a page can have up to 50 managers who can act on behalf of the organisation. While taking on another social platform may seem a lot of work, I believe that brands that implement and integrate their Google+ page well could really reap big rewards, not just in terms of brand awareness but also SEO. However, until the platform further develops, it will be hard to say exactly how SEO and Google+ pages will be intertwined. Google+ is about ‘connections, interactions and activity’ …people, essentially. Surely Google will reward in some way, brands that can prove they have quality, shareable content that has been publically approved (+1ed) by numerous people in their circles?

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. What Brands Need To Know About Google+ Pages

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At Pubcon in November last year, Matt Cutts mentioned that:

“If you have ads obscuring your content, you might want to think about it,” asking publishers to consider, “Do they see content or something else that’s distracting or annoying?”

With Danny Sullivan following up to say:

“Many already assume that Google’s Panda algorithm is already penalizing ad heavy pages. This suggests that this either is not part of the Panda algorithm or that it might be made a separate and more specific algorithm in the works.”

So reading into this, I would suggest that if this wasn’t rolled out last year  - it just has been!

Google has stated that this isn’t a change which will affect every site that has ads above the fold, just those that have an excessive number of ads which obstruct users from getting to the content that they were searching for:

“This algorithmic change noticeably affects less than 1% of searches globally. That means that in less than one in 100 searches, a typical user might notice a reordering of results on the search page. If you believe that your website has been affected by the page layout algorithm change, consider how your web pages use the area above-the-fold and whether the content on the page is obscured or otherwise hard for users to discern quickly. You can use our Browser Size tool, among many others, to see how your website would look under different screen resolutions.”

So that means that if you’ve been penalised, it should be easy enough to get out of. It’s an algorithmic penalty, not a manual one – so if you fix the layout of your page, Google’s filters will pick this up the next time it’s re-crawled and whatever penalty you had previously will be lifted. We’ve seen this many times with other algorithm penalties – and once you figured out what’s caused the drop in rankings, it’s not too difficult to get out of. It’s the manual penalties you want to avoid, Google take note!

And overall it’s not likely to affect a huge number of sites (1% predicted by Google), but it looks like affiliates and ad monetised sites are those most open to suffering. So is this the latest, unofficial panda update? Maybe Google has just got bored of keeping track of the numbers now that it’s 2012 – what do you think?

Image credit: David Allen

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Did Google Just Roll-Out Panda 3.2 (2012 Edition)?

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So I took to improving my time management skills, and thought that I would share with you a few techniques that I am using now in my working life.

Time Planning

Whether you have your time scheduled out for you by management or you prefer to manage your time yourself, ensure that you plan your work in advance.

I use a spreadsheet within Google Docs to create a monthly calendar that I populate with the hours that I need to complete, for the forthcoming month.

By planning your month in advance, you know exactly what is in store for you on a daily basis. It provides you with the flexibility to move your schedule around to suit the needs of your clients and any unexpected changes that may happen.

Email

Communicating via email is a great way to get information to and from your clients and contacts quickly, but it can be a massive distraction.

I, like most others, get distracted by emails and tend to reply immediately to any queries that come through, taking your attention away from what you are currently doing.

If this happens several times throughout the day you are potentially taking an hour or more of productivity out of your day.

Recommedation: Check your emails at certain times during the day, and closing it during the other times.
e.g
9:00 – 10:00am Open
10:00am 12:30pm – Closed
1:30pm – 2:00pm – Open
2:00pm – 5:00pm – Closed
5:00pm – 5:30pm – Open

Email Categories/Labels

Prioritising emails can help save you a large amount of time. Most people, myself included, set up rules that move emails straight into allocated folders. I find this a very useful trick to keep my inbox organised, allowing me to find specific emails quickly.

As well as using rules, I  would recommend using the categories (outlook) or labels (gmail) to separate emails that need to be actioned.

Recommendation:
Create two categories called “To Action” and “Completed”. When you recieve an email that requires you to do an action, then assign it to the “To Action” category. This will provide a constant reminder that you have emails to action, and work that needs to be done. Once you have actioned the emails you can change the category to “Completed”, this will allow you to see all the emails that you actioned. This will help you to keep track of the emails that you need to action and the ones that you have completed, ensuring that your inbox is efficient.

To-Do Lists

To me, knowing what I am doing on a daily/weekly basis is an essential part of managing my time correctly.

Personally I think the best way of organising your work is by having a to-do list. I am such a big believer of this that I actually have three to-do list methods. I know it’s a bit over the top but hey, it seems to work for me. :)

1. Remember the Milk:
I use Remember the Milk, an online to-do list mainly for personal use, including picking up the milk or feeding  the cat.

I do however, use it for work when I am on the move and need to add something to my to-do list. Using the iPhone application I record anything that I think of whilst I am not at the office or don’t have my notepad with me.

If I have made any notes whilst I am out, I transfer any tasks that have been created to the most relevant to-do list.

2. Project Management Tools – Monthly To-do Lists:
There are many project management tools available, but I am a big fan of Basecamp. It gives you a lot of functionality including the ability to keep track of all communication, files, calendar meetings and to-do lists.

In Basecamp I plan out the next three months worth of work for all my clients, split into monthly to-do lists. Doing this allows me to tick off the tasks on completion.

An example monthly to-do list might include the following:
- Monthly Report
- Monthly Client Meeting
- “keyword1″ link building
- “keyword2″ link building
- Keyword Research Review

Although the list tends to be a lot bigger, you get the general gist of what I mean about the monthly to-do lists.

Using project management tools such as Basecamp allows you to share the work that needs to be done with the rest of your team, whilst also providing visibility to the client on what work has and will be carried out.

3. Written To-do List – Weekly:
As mentioned above I create monthly to-do lists that plan out the next three to six months work. Because I am planning for the future these tend to be high level lists.

At the end of each week I take time to look at the monthly to-do lists and write a weekly task list on my notepad for the following week. This would generally include more detailed information.

Example:
Client A
Keyword Research Review
- Long tail keywords
- Analyse keywords generating conversion
- Analyse potential ROI
“keyword1″ link building
- Blogger Outreach
- Guest blogging x3
- www.example.com
- www.example1.com
- www.example2.com

Time Sheeting

Keeping track of what you do for your clients on an hourly/daily/weekly basis is important, not just for you but for your agency.

There are many ways that you can keep track of the time you have spent on a particular project, either manually using spreadsheets or using a database driven tool.

My personal preference is using a tool called Harvest to track time. Harvest allows you to do much more than just time tracking. It includes invoicing, expenses, reports, etc, which are all very valuable. To me the time tracking aspect of the product is great – you create projects and tasks that you record time against as and when you work on a specific client.

As you begin to track your time against the projects you are working on you can see how much time has been spent, how much is left and where the time has been spent. From a project management perspective the account manager can see what the team has been working on and who has done what very quickly by running a quick query.

These are just five techniques that I believe can help improve your time management when working on your projects. Now I just need to solve my personal time management skills to make the wife happy :).

What techniques do you have for managing your time? Do you agree with my suggestions? I look forward to hearing your thoughts and opinions in the comments below.

Image credit – Roby Ferrari on Flickr.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Time Management for SEO

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‘Build websites for users, not search engines’ is the advice continually propounded by insiders at Google. As SEOs, we’re used to looking at websites and analysing how they would be viewed by a search engine. In actual fact, though, there’s a fairly big overlap between what’s helpful for a user and what’s helpful for a search engine, and the user and search engine experiences can often mirror each other. That means that it’s often worth carrying out user testing research in the initial stages of your SEO project to gain valuable insights into how real visitors view and use your site.

User testing isn’t just about usability for humans or identifying bugs; parts of your website that are difficult to use can hide potential SEO problems that you may not have spotted. User testing can help shed light on the user behaviour behind the dry metrics you see in Google Analytics, and its benefits in conversion rate optimisation are obvious. It’s also worth noting that if your client is taking some convincing that they should make a change to their website for SEO reasons, having concrete evidence from the word of users’ mouths might prove more persuasive.

User testing research takes people from your website’s demographic and gives you the benefit of several fresh pairs of eyes to enable you to see your website (or your client’s) as your target audience sees it. Sure, it can only ever be a small sample size, but the insights you can gain from user testing can nevertheless be valuable. Here are just a few of the issues and insights we’ve uncovered with user testing for some of our clients…

High bounce rate
The reason for a high bounce rate isn’t always immediately obvious – particularly if you’ve viewed that site many times and have become, as it were, ‘immune’ to it. I conducted user testing research for one of my clients and it transpired that, upon viewing the homepage for the first time, users weren’t immediately sure what that my client’s site was actually about. This was mainly because the imagery on the homepage was misleading, and the headings on the page weren’t obvious either. If users are having problems figuring out what a site is about, the chances are that Google spiders are too. We’d spotted the lack of optimised headings, but the wider issue of the imagery was only identified by getting real users’ first impressions. Whether bounce rate has any meaningful impact on rankings is beyond the scope of this post, but I’m sure you catch my drift.

High time on site
Similarly, if people are spending a lot of time on your site, you can only really speculate as to why. Is it because they’re are engaging more with your content? Or is it actually because they can’t find what they’re looking for? User testing may be able to help you find out.

Keywords are friendly to users, not just search engines…
…Otherwise why would people type them in? Keywords are revealing about user behaviour, and search volumes for differently worded search terms are revealing about how people think. We’re obviously used to optimising header tags to target keywords, but this can often have benefits to users, too – because keywords can give them a clearer idea of what each section of a site will be about (e.g. “our products” versus “shoes for sale”). Within reason, using keywords to help your users find their way around your site makes sense, and helps avoid confusion over the purpose of the site (which was something user testing highlighted for one of our clients).

Hiding content behind registration
A lengthy registration process for one client highlighted the issues surrounding hiding content behind a log-in. During user testing, users were frustrated by the number of details they had to provide to get at the full-length content, and one even said that if he hadn’t been paid to look at the site, he’d have given up long before he got to the end of the process. So the issue of content being hidden went beyond an SEO issue and it became a possible conversion rate problem. In an ideal world, we’d have liked to have seen all that content immediately in the public domain, for both users and search engines; this not being possible for legal reasons, we recommended a simplified sign-up process and optimisation of the visible content instead.

So how does one conduct user testing research? We’ve used http://www.usertesting.com/, which costs $39 per user and allows you to set your target demographic and specific instructions/tasks that you want users to accomplish (e.g. find a particular product or page). You get a video of the user’s screen as they navigate your site, and a soundtrack of their voice commenting on what they see. This sort of insight obviously delves deeper than dry metrics, user journeys and even heatmaps, because you get explanations rather than straightforward identification of patterns.

Have you conducted user testing research? Did you find it helpful, and did it uncover anything you’d not spotted?

Image credit – mastrobiggo on Flickr.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Why SEOs should be conducting user testing research

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Microsoft adCenter is in many ways similar to AdWords. Your ads appear on searches that match your positive keywords but not your negative keywords. Your account contains campaigns, which contain ad groups, which contain keywords and ads. Your ad’s position and the price of a click are determined by your bid and previous performance. But there are many differences – here are some of the most important ones for when you’re starting out.

Markets and Locations

In adCenter, there are separate options for Market and for Location. The Market determines what language you can use and which websites your ads appear on. Location determines where the users are.

So if your Market is ‘UK – English’, and you target all Locations, then your ads will appear on English websites like uk.msn.com to visitors from anywhere in the world. If the Market is ‘UK – English’ and the Location is United Kingdom, the ads will be on the same websites, but only visitors from the UK will see your ads.

The current Markets are USA (in English or Spanish), Canada (French or English), UK (English), France (English) and Singapore (English). You choose a campaign’s Market when you create the campaign, and it can’t be changed afterwards. Location can be set at campaign or ad group level, and can be changed at any time.

Learn more here.

Normalisation

All search terms and keywords – regardless of match type – are normalised. AdCenter will ignore CapITAlisAtion, áccents and most #punctuation. Note that plurals are left unchanged.

Apostrophes are treated differently to other punctuation. If an apostrophe appears in a name or in the middle of a word, it will be left, so “O’Brian” is different from “OBrian” or “O Brian”. If an apostrophe is used in a possessive, the non-possessive form will be used, e.g. “Keiko’s” is the same as “Keiko” but not “Keikos” or “Keiko s”.

Words like ‘the’, ‘of’, ‘what’, ‘for’ and ‘a’ are ignored. This means adCenter sees no difference between the searches “Keyword”, “How to Keyword” and “What is Keyword for?” – any of these terms can trigger an ad that has ‘Keyword’ on exact match. Negative keywords are normalised the same as positive ones, so you can’t stop this.

Microsoft’s explanation of normalisation is here.

Dynamic Text and Placeholders

In AdWords, you can use Dynamic Keyword Insertion to put terms from the search query into your ad. AdCenter has a similar feature, which allows extra information.

Firstly, you can put {keyword} into your ad, and this will be replaced by the triggered keyword when the ad appears.

Secondly, adCenter will let you give your keywords three Placeholder parameters, which can then be inserted into adverts. You might have keywords that are misspellings, and use a Placeholder for the correct spelling to appear in the advert. Or you could have keywords for different products, and use Placeholders for their price or special offer information.

Microsoft’s help page for dynamic text is here.

And Some More…

Negative keywords can be phrase or exact match, but not broad. Positive keywords can be broad match, phrase match or exact match (although broad match is a bit less broad than it is in AdWords).

AdCenter has demographic data available on searchers logged into Microsoft or MSN accounts. This means there are demographic targeting options, where you can exclude or change bids based on age group or gender. You can also get age group and gender reports.

AdCenter gives search query reports (available in the Report tab), but they do not give search query information for search terms that generate no clicks. The number of impressions given is not the actual number of impressions for a search term; adCenter only reports the number of impressions that occurred within an hour of a click.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. How Is adCenter Different to AdWords?

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Firstly, you may have noticed that in December we opened a new London office in Paddington. Alongside this, we recruited two new SEO execs – Gillian Cook and Pak Hou Cheung – both of whom have written some great posts on the SEOptimise blog already.

And now we are delighted to welcome Chelsea Blacker to head our London SEO team. Chelsea has a huge amount of experience in SEO, having worked within the search industry agency-side for the last 5 years. In addition to this Nick Clarke will be joining the Oxford team as a content writer later this month.

So following a very successful 2011 which included some great new client wins, conference speaking at leading industry events and topped off with a search award - we have plenty to look forward to for a very exciting year ahead!

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Chelsea Blacker Joins SEOptimise London Team

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To be honest, from my school days of using Google right up to today, the search engine giant has not once stopped impressing me. From its algorithmic updates for a better user experience to its cloud based computing services, Google has captured my life and sadly, probably my soul.

Today I will be sharing with you a collection of my favourite Google search operator queries, not only to help open your mind to the powers of Google being much more than a search engine, but also to show you that knowing some of these queries will help you become better in the art of SEO.

6 Starter Operator Search Operator Queries

These queries are particularly helpful because they’re generally quick and easy short cuts in narrowing your search results:

5 Basic Mathematics Search Operator Queries

Google search provides users with the ability to calculate simple maths without the need for your calculator:

4 Advanced Mathematics Search Operator Queries

Surprisingly, Google does not stop at the most simple of mathematics and is there for the more complicated algorithmic-based equations:

7 Converting Tool Search Operator Queries

Google offers users the ability in search to convert various units:

7 Everyday Helpful Search Operator Queries

I find these operator queries particularly useful everyday, and maybe you will too:

2  Google News Search Operator Queries

These search operator queries are restricted to only Google News – very useful when you want to find news from a particular country or source-specific articles:

4 Blog  Search Operator Queries

When searching for particular blog-related links, these operator queries can help you search by author, post type and blog title:

12 SEO  Operator Queries

As an SEO practitioner, one of my most powerful search tools has to be Google itself. Just knowing these search operator queries exist is only quarter of the battle.  But understanding how they work and best practices is where you can excel:

Top Tip to Remember: In Google search you are not restricted to just one query per search. For example, you could have multiple queries in one search – e.g. site:seoptimise.com “web trends” -ppc

Thanks for reading this and please do share some of your favourite search operator queries!

*Image credit: niknack on Flickr.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. A Collection of 47 Helpful Google Search Operator Queries

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Like most people, SEO practitioners reflect on the past year and attempt to improve their skills in the new year.

If you haven’t made up your mind what exactly you want to change in the coming year, check out these suggestions for 30 SEO resolutions for 2012 that draw on modern industry best practices and growing trends.

Content Creation

• I will create less shallow content and more quality “one of a kind” pieces of content.
• I will create more content using multiple rich media such as images, audio, videos and the like.
• I will write shorter, more readable postings instead of long, hard to read ones that nobody can follow.
• I will create more content on site and waste less time on third party sites that require me to give away “User Generated Content”.
• I will provide less average sales copy and create more outstanding content for inbound marketing purposes.

Link Building

• I will perform fewer tedious tasks such as contacting unwitting webmaster about link exchanges and provide more appealing incentives for people to link to me voluntarily.
• I will go after more citations and fewer links to get traction on local search and Google Places instead of just the organic index that gets less exposure.
• I will make sure my old inbound links are still there and also fix 404 errors on my own site.
• I will link out more, not only to get noticed and more links back, but to reach out honestly to like-minded industry professionals – after all, we don’t compete most of time.
• I won’t sneak in “free links” anymore on unsuspecting sites that would not voluntarily link to me.

Social Media

• I will market less and contribute more in order to become a valuable contributor to social media.
• I will get organised while social networking and not just waste time drifting from update to update on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.
• I will follow fewer hypes and not just jump in on every social site that web celebrities want me to. I will go where the real value is.
• I won’t just share links all the time on social sites but instead use them in a balanced way, adding networking and conversation to my daily habits.
• I will schedule times for my social media activity instead of just dropping in and getting distracted all the time during work hours.

Blogging

• I will blog more regularly instead of just updating my social media profiles on third party sites.
• I will guest blog on other blogs, both the already important ones and the not yet very well known.
• I will focus my blog writing on the desired outcome – not just blog for the page views and social shares.
• I will socialise with other bloggers both online and in real life to establish lasting relationships.
• I won’t check web analytics daily or more often and obsess about metrics that only make sense to check in the long term or every other week.

Tools

• I will use fewer tools and more techniques. SEO and SMO are still about how you use them, not how many tools you use.
• I will use the tools I prefer more in-depth instead of just scratching the surface of the features.
• I will take more time for social media analytics and monitoring and find out what real humans say about me, my contributions and why.
• I will not trust tools with everything and make sure to cross check data and compare with other outcomes.
• I will recommend only the tools I truly use, not the ones I’m an affiliate of.

SEO

• I will perform more SEO tests and publish the results to the benefit of the SEO community, no matter how vague the outcomes are.
• I will provide more advice to educate the clients and their teams and make them more self-sufficient.
• I will share my techniques, tools and case studies, not just to show off but to get recognition from the SEO community.
• I will rant and complain less about Google, other SEOs and bloggers and instead keep on improving my own arsenal.
• I will build a recognisable brand instead of just relying on generic rankings on Google.

These resolutions are written in the first person to make it easier for you to identify with them and to apply them yourself. They are not necessarily my personal resolutions.

On a side note:  this is my last post on SEOptimise after more than four years. I hope you liked my posts. If you did, you can keep on reading my own blog over at SEO 2.0.

The SEOptimise team will take care of this blog completely from now on, so there won’t be any shortage of posts.

* Creative Common image by Aftab Uzzaman.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 30 SEO Resolutions for 2012

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The first mention of these subtle changes came in November, when Google cited one change as:

• “Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.” It would appear that by Google is trying to reduce issues of duplicate content by making sure the same image doesn’t appear twice.

It was during this month that Google also rolled out the +1 button to Image search. Its social media offering opens up to integrate photos, allowing +1 users to highlight favourite images. This marks the start of a personalised web experience and reinforces the growing sentiment that social and search are becoming increasingly intertwined.

In December’s post, Google mentioned:

• “Image result freshness: We made a change to how we determine image freshness for news queries. This will help us find the freshest images more often.”

A month earlier, Google announced its freshness update to search, which prioritises recent, relevant and timely results.  Joe Crowther, of Metro news site explains, “The quicker you get the image up the better. Google tends to assume that the first to break a story or image is the source. As the story develops, it will re-adjust, dependent of other signals”. As image search succumbs to the freshness update, we can deduce that Google is continuing to include image search within all its major algorithm updates.

Last week, Google announced 30 subtle algorithm changes. This ‘monthly series’ instalment was different to any previous one due to Google publishing the codenames attached to each change. In its newfound approach to communication, Google mentioned three updates specific to image search.

• “Image Search landing page quality signals. [launch codename “simple”] This is an improvement that analyzes various landing page signals for Image Search. We want to make sure that not only are we showing you the most relevant images, but we are also linking to the highest quality source pages.”

This update is rather reflective of the Panda update, which favours high site quality.

• “Better spam detection in Image Search. [launch codename “leaf”] This change improves our spam detection in Image Search by extending algorithms we already use for our main search results.”

SEOptimise’s Matt Taylor explains the possible implications of this for an SEO campaign: “When Google rolls out something from the main search to image search that wasn’t there previously, it may be possible to spot patterns on what Google deems as spammy by noting which sites disappear from the search results. If you notice images from your site disappear from the image search, this gives you an indication that Google thinks you are spammy”.

• “Improvements to image size signal. [launch codename “matter”] This is an improvement to how we use the size of images as a ranking signal in Image Search. With this change, you’ll tend to see images with larger full-size versions.”

The improvements to image size present opportunities for ecommerce sites. Bigger images will rank better, and if these sites have good size images of their products, they may be able to pull traffic from image search for products that may be difficult to rank for normally.

These changes not only signal that image size is now important, but also that the quality of a landing page (or the page on which the image sits) determines how an image is ranked. Along with added spam detection, all these updates point to a “cleaning up of image search”.

Yesterday Google announced its “+1 Your World” project, which confirms and further enhances Google personalised search for users based on their social circles. Search queries will now deliver results from the anonymous web and results from the user’s own personal networks (providing that the information has been shared with that user). Image search will be no different. However, the personal image results will only be truly useful depending on the information that is attached to the images. Images posted with the original JPEG filename will not rank well in personal search, just as you would expect in a public search.

This update strengthens Google’s previous attempts to clean up web images by rewarding well classified image information.  It is apparent that Google Image Search is being targeted with algorithms that reflect the ideas behind the major  Google algorithm update, which would suggest that this area of Google’s business is becoming more important.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. What Signals Are Google Sending About Image Search?

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• Gaining market share in the social network market.
• To improve the quality of search results through increased trustworthiness and personalisation (research by Nielsen suggests that 42% of people trust search results, but 90% trust recommendations from friends).

What’s Google’s Game Plan With ‘Search, Plus Your World’?

To really understand the impact, we need to realise what Google’s game plan with social search is. I’ll point out now that I’m not an expert or an insider in any way, but this is where I think Google might be going with Search, Plus Your World and Google+.

1. Google is creating a ‘map’ similar to Facebook’s Open Graph that connects people with their content, websites and readers to understand who produces what content, what happens with that content and how people react. This is where the rel=”author” and rel=”publisher” tags play a big part (I wrote a post about this on Social Media Explorer).
2. Google will then learn contextual information about readers and content producers taken from their Google account activity (e.g. what YouTube videos they watch and searches they make when signed in) and use this data in combination with existing ranking factors and G+ sharing data to better place content in search results.

If I’m right, then I can see a shift in prominence in the SERPs to content producers with an active audience, but only in niches where communities exist.

For example, in the social media niche, sites such as Mashable, Social Media Explorer and Social Media Today will receive extra prominence in SERPs because they have an audience containing not only the ‘influencers’ but also the remaining mass of social media enthusiasts who share their content. The social media sites that don’t have an active audience or community will lose prominence.

In niches where there is no community (think ‘septic tank maintenance’ or ‘zinc coating of ships’) social search won’t change anything, at all. That is unless a company creates an active audience from scratch – for example, how Compare The Market arguably created an active audience in the insurance niche using Aleksandr Orlov.

As I never wrote a ‘2012 predictions’ post, here are five things I think this shift towards social search will make us think about more as online marketers.

1. Email marketing will become increasingly important due to the power it has to encourage desired actions, such as social shares. I am currently writing a post on SEOmoz about using email auto-responders to influence social SEO – hopefully it should go live in the coming week (follow me and I’ll tweet it when it does go live!)
2. SEO strategies will have two sub-strategies: the ‘personalised SEO strategy’ and the ‘non-personalised strategy’ – the latter of which will be almost identical to what you’re doing already, but the former being more about gaining social approval and engagement from your audience.
3. Low quality link building will become obsolete in niches where communities and active audiences exist. High quality link building will still play a major part in ranking for all sites, low quality link building will still work for uncompetitive niches with no audience.
4. Companies will need to find ways of gaining the ‘social approval’ of influencers in their niche (if such a thing exists). +1s from your niche’s celebrity will be the social equivalent of the .edu/.gov link.
5. Google will work on increasing the proportion of people who are signed in. That one’s just obvious :)

Conclusion

It’s fair to say that Google+ and social search will inevitably impact SEO this year. To what extent we don’t know, whether Google decides to make the ratio of social:links as a ranking factor 1:1 or 5:1 or 0.1:1 just isn’t possible to say yet, but my advice is prepare for the worst case scenario and you won’t regret it, because it’s something that will only increase in importance over time.

Of course, this is all my opinion and if you disagree with me I’d love to hear about it and build a fuller understanding of all sides of the story. As usual, share your thoughts in comments below!

Image Credit: Birgerking, vanmarcianoart.

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The background

We had been working with our client for about a year and, through a sensible link building campaign, had just managed to achieve decent rankings for some of the most competitive and highest converting terms in their industry. Then within a week their previously consistent bottom of page one/top of page two rankings (doesn’t sound great until you see their competitors) dropped to page three and four, at the same time as their link count experiencing a large and very unnatural spike.

Upon investigation of their back links we identified over 80 sites each linking back from ten different pages with exactly the same title tags (which were the same as some pages on our client site), random URLs and the same anchor text. They were remarkably easy to spot.

When we checked the sites it appeared some were adult or other spammy sites, but most of the sites were hacked WordPress sites. They had ten or so pages added that used the HTML code and content from our clients’ site. To make matters worse they had replaced some of the content with links to Viagra, casino and adult sites – not really neighbourhoods we wanted them to be associated with.

So the scale of our problem was 800+ pages linking multiple times to our client, as well as various low quality/spammy/malware sites, using large parts of our clients’ content, effectively creating duplicate content issues.

So if you have a similar problem here is what I suggest doing next…

Step 1 – Identify you have a problem

This is probably step minus one, and it is usually quite easy, but you have to be looking (if you don’t check your own backlinks regularly you should). You do not want your client to find out before you!

Just to show you how easy it can be sometimes, check out the anchor text report for one of our clients competitors – anyone would think they were an online pharmacy!

As a side note – if you have a forum or profile pages make sure they are moderated!!

So the things to look for are:
1. Your rankings take a dive but nobody else’s do
2. You have loads of extra links all of sudden
3. Analytics shows traffic to pages you never knew you had or traffic from odd sites
4. You have an identical number of links for lots of different anchor text variations, especially if you haven’t been link building with those terms
5. There are odd repeating patterns in anchor text and titles of sites linking in
6. Your linked to from sites which have random URLs
7. Probably the most obvious – you have a load of anchor text links for drugs/porn/fake watches but you’re a University

Step 2 – Gather intelligence

The next step is to gather all of the information you can on the links. Ideally you want to end up with a list of all the pages linking to you, at least two ways of contacting the site (email, contact form or telephone number) as well as the whois information for their hosting or domain registrar.

There are a few ways to do this, with the most basic being putting a block of text into Google and then visiting each site individually. But as always there are tools you can use, Open Site Explorer or other back link analysis tools are good to get a list of URLs. If you are feeling particularly techie you can build your own SERP scraper using Google Docs or the Excel SEO Tools extension.

At this point you can start to look for patterns – do they all run the same CMS (e.g. WordPress sites) or are they all owned by the same people. This should give you an indication of if the site owner is aware the links are there or not and if someone has done it deliberately or not.

Step 3 – Tell your client

Now is a good time to sit down with your client and talk about what you have found. This is best done in person or at least on the telephone. This is the time when you need to know your stuff. And by this I don’t just mean having it written down, but actually know the details off by hart to. Now is the time you are going to have to show that you are on top of the situation, and fumbling around for the answer to a question isn’t going to help that.

Try to avoid getting involved in the who’s and why’s and instead just focus on what you have found and what you are going to do – and make sure you have a plan in place before you go.

It is probably worth double checking at this point to see if your client has accidentally done something while trying to “help” with SEO. It is unlikely, but worth asking all the same.

Step 4 – Change your content

If you suffer a similar fate to us and someone has scraped your site and is using your content, I would strongly consider if you can change your on-site content (even just temporarily). This will help with the duplicate content in the short term and will also help you identify if it is an on-going issue (i.e. does the new content get scraped as well). If they are pages with no or few other links you could even consider changing the URLs and then 301 redirect the link target URLs to another domain completely.

Make sure you have screenshots of the old content and can restore it if you need to.

Step 5 – First contact

The next thing to do is to try and get the links removed completely. There will be different approaches to take depending on if the site owner is likely to be aware of the links or not.

As the sites that were linking to our client had obviously been hacked, I started with a polite email to the site owner (to both contact methods) informing them that they had been hacked and asking them to remove the pages as it would be doing neither site any good. I also provided a list of the URLs in question just to help them find them all. This method got about a 40% response rate and all of the site owners removed the pages (always go back and check).

For those who don’t respond to the first email, try again a couple of days later and keep a record of when you emailed. This will be important when you move on to some of the later steps. At this point you can be more insistent that they remove the link, especially if they have used your content as well (copyright is your friend and don’t be afraid to mention it). Again, give the site owner a couple of days to get back to you.

Step 6 – Take the matter further if you can

At this point you will be fairly sure you aren’t going to get a response, so the next step is to bypass the site owner and go higher up the chain.

Most hosts or registrars have terms and conditions and a procedure for reporting site owners who are breaking them. If a site is using your content without permission you can ask the hosting company to take down the site due to breach of copyright. They usually require you to fill in a form with proof and give them URLs to check (but you will have this information in your spreadsheet). It is always good to mention you have already tried to contact the site a couple of times already. They will contact the site and ask for an explanation, but failing good justification most will be taken down. In our case this was obvious as all the pages had our clients copyright information on the bottom.

Another good route to take if sites have obviously been hacked is to point this out to the hosting company. They will then try and contact the site owner and a lot of the time they suspend the site in the meantime.

The very least that will happen is that they will try and contact site owners on your behalf.

By this point hopefully you’ll have got rid of at least 80% of the links.

Step 7 – Contact Google

After exhausting all possible methods of contact, if the links are still there, it’s time to report them to Google via Web Master Tools. Most people think that these reports are ignored, and they very well could be, but it is more so if you have to submit a reconsideration request it shows you have tried to draw their attention to the issue.

Step 8 – Reconsideration Request

If removing the links hasn’t resulted in your rankings starting to move back up, the final step is to send a reconsideration request. There are plenty of resources about how to do this, so I will not go into detail here. But make sure that you draw to their attention that you identified the issue (and that it definitely had nothing to do with you), that you took steps to remove the links and that you reported the links yourself (a good way of showing that you were being completely up front).

So those are the steps that we went through with our client, which did repair some of the damage done, but we are still playing catch up to a certain extent.

It would be good to hear if others have gone through similar stuff and if anyone has any additional steps to add.

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So for 2012, I’ve put together a conference calendar of search events – let me know if there’s any I’ve missed!

February:

• SES London – London, 21-23 February 2012

March:

• Think Visibility – Leeds, 3rd March 2012
• UK Search Awards Conference – London, 9th March 2012
• Distilled – Link Love – London, 30th March 2012

April:

• BrightonSEO – Brighton, tbc

May:

• International Search Summit – London, 14 May 2012
• SMX London - London, 15-16 May 2012
• SAScon - Manchester, 17-18 May 2012

June:

• a4uexpo Europe – Barcelona, 19-20 June 2012

Oct:

• a4uexpo London – London, tbc
• Distilled – Search Love – London, tbc

Nov:

• Conversion Conference – London, 27-28 November 2012

I’ll be speaking at a couple of these events, more on that once I can confirm them. So which events will you be attending this year?

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But I would argue that one of the most important attributes of a successful SEO campaign is communication of knowledge – within an agency, of course, but also (perhaps less obviously) with clients. Many clients have little or no knowledge of SEO, and why should they? That’s what we’re here for, after all. But it’s unfortunately a fact of life as an SEO that algorithm updates and other external factors are not the only risk posed to a successful SEO project. Without at least a minimal level of SEO education, actions taken by a client can actually be detrimental to the SEO efforts of their agency or consultant.

One of my SEO New Year’s Resolutions (more Resolutions from SEOptimise in a forthcoming blog post by Matthew Taylor) is to help clients to help us by ensuring they have enough knowledge to understand our work, its aims and methodologies, and what they can do to ensure that we’re able to get them the best results possible. So I thought I’d kick off the New Year by taking a look at the top ways in which an SEO project can be sabotaged by a client. This is not me ranting about my lovely clients by the way – it’s more a retrospective look at some of the bottlenecks I’ve encountered in otherwise smooth SEO projects over the last year or so.

1. Changing the website without telling us
Whether it’s launching a new section, rolling back to an old version of the site, rewriting copy or even a full blown redesign, it’s really important to get the SEO perspective before any changes are made, to ensure that a) new material is optimised from the word go and b) prior SEO efforts are not damaged or lost. There’s nothing worse than finding that your client’s rankings have plummeted because the site has been reverted to an old, unoptimised version without your knowledge.

The solution:  emphasise to your client the importance of liaising on potential website changes before they happen, and in plenty of time. If there’s a redesign in the offing, ensure you’re involved from the outset to ensure that the new site is structured in an SEO-friendly way. It’s much easier to make changes in the planning stages than it is to change things once it’s live.

2. CMS that doesn’t allow crucial SEO changes
Not the client’s fault, but a CMS system that doesn’t allow the implementation of such vital elements as title tags is clearly a major spanner in the works. The worst thing is not being prepared for it – you get your title tags written and signed off, then get granted CMS access only to find that you can’t actually implement them because the title tag is taken automatically from the H1 field and can’t be edited separately!

The solution:  ascertain before the start of the project whether the CMS has the appropriate functionality. Ask the client to get their web developer to implement it if necessary, so that you have no nasty surprises awaiting you down the line.

3.  A cripplingly slow sign-off process
SEO is continually evolving, and dramatic changes can happen overnight, without warning – just look at the Panda update, for example. That means that we have to be quick to react, and we need the flexibility to be able to adjust both strategies and actual on-site optimisation quickly and decisively if necessary. Our ability to do this can be severely hampered by the need to go through lengthy sign-off procedures.

Even in the course of normal, day-to-day SEO work, project delivery can be significantly delayed by slow sign-off on crucial elements of the campaign – for instance, not having approval for targeted keywords means we’re not able to proceed to writing title tags, which would clearly have a big impact on rankings. Similarly, if content for use in link building is slow to be approved, this will obviously limit our ability to build the highest quality links in a timely manner. It’s frustrating when ranking performance is hampered because we’ve done as much of the agreed work as we can, but can’t actually implement it.

The solution:  establish a mutually agreeable sign-off process and, where possible, minimise client involvement. For example, once guidelines are in place, ask them to approve the titles of blog posts only rather than reading through every post.

4.  Confusing SEO with PR and advertising
What a lot of clients don’t realise is that some SEO methods are nothing to do with their brand. When it comes to building links, for example from guest blog posts, the emphasis is on finding interesting angles that will work well as blog posts. This is particularly important when the client’s company or products are not especially interesting in themselves, meaning that we have to create the interest by looking at wider or related fields in order to gain bloggers’ interest. When clients apply their own brand guidelines to completely external (anonymous) posts, or even insist on us only writing about their products, it can become very difficult to do our job – because often what you’re left with is a salesy piece in a style that simply isn’t suitable for a blog and which will not get accepted for publication.

The solution:  give your client a thorough explanation, along with examples, of what your work will entail, showing how and why it’s being done and reassuring them that their brand will not be harmed in any way.

5.  ‘Helping out’ with link building
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great when clients take an interest in link building. But not when they get involved by paying a fiver for 10,000 links (this has happened to us). As we’ve previously established here on the SEOptimise blog, this tactic doesn’t work and this sort of activity would seriously undermine a carefully considered link building strategy. Obviously we should be educating clients to aid our efforts by including links in their PR material (for example), but clients should be strongly encouraged to check with you before ‘helping out’ with link building.

The solution:  when forming a link building strategy, take the opportunity to educate your client about link building and explain which practices are outdated. Make sure your project plan is clear on who has responsibility for tasks.

What common problems do you encounter in running SEO projects and how do you solve them? Let us know in the comments below!

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I wanted to find out what the general consensus was on this controversial topic within the SEO world, so I set out on something of a fact-finding mission to attempt to answer one question:  does blog commenting work, and if so, can it be done in a white hat way? (Ok, I guess that’s two questions then.)

Let’s clarify what we mean by ‘blog commenting’
We’ve probably all left comments on blog posts we’ve enjoyed or where we’ve felt we had something to contribute. What we’re talking about here is the use of blog commenting purely for the purposes of gaining links – i.e. you wouldn’t have left a comment if you hadn’t been trying to build a link. That might mean an anonymous blog comment with an anchor text link in true old-school black hat style, or it could mean the more socially acceptable form of an actual contribution to a post but including a link back in the author profile, with your name as the anchor text. Or it could mean a comment linking to a resource on your site because it’s relevant to the post in question. Either way, the motivation behind the blog commenting I’m talking about is self-serving, making it ethically questionable in the eyes of many.

Are people still using blog comments in this day and age?
I ran a quick poll to gain a rough idea of what proportion of the SEO community actually use blog commenting as a link building tactic. Here are the results, based on 52 votes:

So, based on this sample size, that’s 65% of SEOs saying yes to some form of blog commenting being used for link building. Encouragingly, it looks as though most are doing so using their real identity, but that’s still 35% who don’t ‘do’ blog commenting (or at least, won’t own to it).

So does blog commenting actually help your rankings?
One could argue that if it didn’t work, people wouldn’t still be building links using this method. But then, plenty of people still use the obsolete meta keywords tag. Does blog commenting still work, or are the 65% who said they do it wasting their time?

The anecdotal evidence certainly supports the argument in favour of blog commenting for link building. One particularly enthusiastic commenter on the poll said:

“I, and many other people, have ranked pages using nothing but blog comment links.

There’s no opinion in if it works or not – the answer is yes. How *well* it works vs. other tactics, what types of terms it can work for, and if it’s worth the effort of doing manually are other questions entirely.

But, as a sweeping statement – anyone who claims it doesn’t work either… did it wrong, never tried for themselves, or didn’t do enough of it.” – Ian Howells

I also asked SEOptimise’s very own link building genius Marcus Taylor for his opinion, and he said:

“Blog commenting is something I’ve experimented with considerably over the years and have ranked sites competitively using just blog commenting as a strategy, so I can confidently say that it does work, although it’s certainly not the most effective link building strategy.”

Overcoming the obstacles
What are the main obstacles to blog commenting? Do the obstacles mean that it’s ultimately an ineffective link building method? Let’s take a look:

• Perhaps the main obstacle to blog commenting for link building is that many of the comments you make may be filtered out, either automatically by spam software such as Akismet, or manually by whoever approves the comments.
• You have to spend time finding blogs to comment on. If you’re putting any thought into blog commenting, you may be finding blogs which are relevant to your industry – thus providing links from relevant pages.
• You have to take the time to make an actual contribution if you want your comment to be approved. That really means actually reading the post, which can be time consuming.

So is it still worth it? Some surmise that blog comment links, even followed ones, may carry less weight with Google than regular links. However, as Rand Fishkin points out in this useful post on blog commenting, if you leave a helpful enough comment, the author of the post might even edit the original post to include your link in the post itself – and that’s a lot better than relying on comment-based links!  The bottom line:  a helpful response that suggests your link as an additional resource is likely to result in sufficient success to justify the extra time it takes to leave a worthwhile comment.

Blog commenting isn’t just about rankings
Those who scream “black hat” at the practice of blog commenting are perhaps forgetting that there are benefits other than rankings. For example, it’s certainly helpful in blogger outreach – if you’ve contributed useful points to someone’s blog posts in the past and they recognise your name as someone who knows what they’re talking about, you’re much more likely to be able to guest post for them. It’s also a reasonably effective way of engaging with relevant communities – i.e. your target market.

This is what my Twitter followers had to say about blog commenting…

“Not sure I use it for link building per se, but I do leave them for the engagement side. I encourage clients to engage in communities in that way – would I do it on their behalf? Not unless I really knew what I was saying inside out, as saying the wrong things is more damaging for the brand than any link gain may give.” – Peter Handley

“Although I don’t use commenting for link building directly, I do sometimes use it as an early stage of building a relationship with a blogger or particular author as part of outreach projects.” – Paul Rogers

Marcus Taylor added, “I think the greater benefit of commenting is to build relationships with the bloggers themselves. In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with blog commenting, providing you don’t do the whole spammy anchor text name thing and you do add value to the post.  Steer clear of overdoing it or doing it on spammy/irrelevant sites solely for the links and you’ll be fine.”

So from what I’ve seen, the consensus seems to be:  there’s still a place for blog commenting – but not the spammy black hat kind. Blog comments can build you valuable links both directly and indirectly, but maximum benefit comes from genuine engagement – communicate what you’re interested in and knowledgeable about, and the time it takes will more than repay itself.

Image by Kristina B on Flickr.

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