Thursday, October 31, 2013

Guidelines to improve Mobile Search communication


Mobile search is becoming more and more important for companies of all shapes and sizes. According to the newest quarterly report from RKG, more than a quarter of organic and paid search traffic went through smartphones and tablets in the second quarter of this year. And this isn’t just limited to domestic markets. In China and India, mobile has already overtaken static search, import that any marketers wishing to target those nations would do well to keep mobile in mind.

Mobile Mistakes

Google recently announced changes in its algorithms that would successfully punish sites that were not optimized for mobile. Some common mistakes they listed include unplayable videos, faulty redirects, URLs that show as an error page to smartphone users, irrelevant cross-linking, and slow page loading speeds. Wherever your markets are, it’s clearly significant to make your content visible and available to mobile users. 

But the procedure doesn’t end there. Once users find your mobile optimized site, they also need to be able to navigate it quickly and easily. Microsoft has reported that 70% of PC ‘query chains’ are finished in about a week. This means users often search, bookmark, and return to the site before implementation a task. In contrast, 70% of mobile searchers complete their task in about one hour. Mobile users tend to be more focused and are often looking for information, goods, or services that they need right now.

Make it Easier to Search

One way to ensure users can find the information they need without leaving your site is by having a high quality site search. Mobile users do not want to browse through huge product displays or be forced to navigate through numerous pages until they find what they want. Site search allows them to access the relevant products or pages quickly. Site search users also tend to convert at a higher rate, so it’s necessary for companies to strengthen their mobile website search and maximize the website’s performance.
Here are a few tips for a more effective site search:

Use a famous Search Box

Don’t make them look for it!  If they want to use site search then it makes sense to ensure that the search box is one of the first belongings they see. Display it prominently at the top of the homepage and other important pages and make sure it’s clearly labeled.

Use Auto Complete

Auto Complete suggests terms when visitors type the first letters of a keyword, making it easier for users to find what they are looking for. You might also consider an Auto Suggest feature, which suggests choice items based on products the user already viewed. The Deb Shops chain reported a 20 per cent increase in adds to cart for users exploring with a ‘More Like This…’ feature.

Use Infinite Scrolling

Infinite scrolling of search results is another way to decrease typing, clicking, and waiting for new pages to load. When visitors get near the end of the page of search results, more results are loaded robotically. This may seem like a small feature, but it makes your site more user friendly.

Provide Localized Information    
          
Many mobile search tasks are localized in nature, meaning users are looking for goods or services applicable to their current location. This can be provided using the mobile device’s GPS tracking facilities.

Display your Promotions

When visitors search for a brand name or product that is on sale, include a keyword-driven banner at the top of the search results to highlight that promotion. You get to push your promotion and the visitor could get a great deal!

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

SEO Touch-Points throughout Website Design & Development


Step 1 – Information Architecture Development
 
One of the greatest parts of stepping into this role is having the chance to learn that the sitemap and IA are much more complex than I had experienced in the past. We need to judge consumer research, competitive research, business objectives, federal policy, etc.

It is easy to tell that in our case, search strategy is more useful and less very important. Ideally we will be able to attain the best of all worlds, but contributing to the massive research before the construction of a website gives us the chance to weigh keyword optimization & schema with messaging, etc. 

Long story short, having the opportunity to conduct thorough keyword research and use it as an power on the final sitemap rather than a concrete road map results in a final product which integrates comprehensive user research, search strategy, and modern IA strategies. What a great way to start a project.

Step 2 – Copywriting
 
Now that the sitemap for a new site has been resolute, we can conduct another round of keyword research, this time in a much more focused (and less exploratory) manner. The best part about mapping out keywords in this stage is having the skill to oversee their execution, and you don’t have to work alone. 

For an SEO professional, I feel it is incredibly important to gather feedback from all parties involved. Whether its working with your creative team to find out how the keywords mesh with their vision for a site, or discussing with the development team how keyword selections may affect technical execution, this stage is a great opportunity to encourage collaboration and accomplish your SEO objectives while gathering feedback from your peers. Once again, search is truly integrated.

Step 3 – Design
 
This is where as an SEO, you get to pull out your fine-tooth comb. While it may not be the most wonderful of tasks, making sure image naming conventions are in place and teaching designers about a/b testing can be incredibly rewarding in the big scheme of things. 

I personally am careful to never mess with creative juices, but sometime there are search ranking factors that need to be explored during the design phase that can impact how much copy goes on to a page and how well optimized your site is to send users through conversion funnels. 

Step 4 – Development
 
This is a very significant step, and there are a lot of hats in the ring. At this point the site is ready to be built and your guidance as a search specialist is extremely important to the performance of the website post-production.

 Have you mapped out your 301 redirects and talked to the development team about site speed and canonical content? Are you memorable with the CMS and its intricacies? What kinds of issues do you foresee for the development team in implementing your search strategy from a technical standpoint? These are all significant questions, and they have to be answered concisely. In the integrated marketing process this is where the real challenge begins.

Imagine having a client who paid for search addition and your first post-launch advice is to optimize site speed. This is also the point where you have total control over what you want to track and tag. If you can’t converse with development and map out tracking snippets for key events and conversions, you are putting yourself in front of a nice, thick brick wall.

Step 5 – Measurement & Growth
 
It is a pretty overwhelming feeling when a new site is constructed and your new search strategy is functioning after such epic teamwork. Now you have the liability of reporting on your strategy and providing insights that will continue to pick up the site over time.

 First, you can pat yourself on the back for covering all of your SEO bases the first time around, and next you can start to get eager about implementing some good old fashioned reporting. I am a strong believer that website performance doesn’t have a ceiling. 

Although your initial search strategy is solid and in place, there is always chance to improve the site. Good reporting will always lead to actionable insights, so use it to keep your search mojo flowing.

Conclusion
 
The bottom line is that search strategies should be nurtured in to the design and development procedure as much as possible, and it is a long process that requires organization and the willingness to collaborate. When done correctly, working through these five touch points can result in a strong product that is ready for testing and expansion. This process ensures the basics are in place, the right factors are considered, and team structure is taking place.

Matt Cutts about links and google rankings


Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts said that a website with a large quantity of pages won't automatically rank better than others. So addition more pages to your site won't help your home page automatically rank better than minor sites.

However, Cutts said that a site with more pages will obviously get more traffic because each of those individual pages can also rank for their own set of search queries, rising the overall opportunity for sites to gain visitors.

Cutts stressed how links also contribute to rankings, something that a bigger site often has more of naturally.

"Now typically if the site does have more pages, it might have more links pointing to it, which means it has higher PageRank," Cutts said. "If that is the case we might be willing to creep a little bit deeper into the website and if it has higher PageRank, then we might think it's a tiny bit of a better match for users queries.

"So those are some that factors concerned, just having a big website with a lot of pages by itself does not automatically confer a increase but if you have a lot of links or a lot of PageRank, that is leading to deeper crawling within your site, then that might be the sort of indicator that maybe sites would rank just a little bit higher," Cutts said.

So once again, while having a big site is great, those inbound links are still going to play a key role in rankings, much more so than a larger website.

"Again just having the number of pages doesn't give you a increase though," Cutts added. "It might give you a few more opportunities, but usually the only reason you get that chance is because we see more links to your website so we are willing to creep a little bit deeper and find more pages to index.

Bottom line: a larger website doesn't routinely give you a higher ranking, but the aftereffects of having a larger site, such as having more pages and more possible for someone to link to your site as well as getting overall search traffic on those internal pages, does help.

Having a large site is great, but once again you need to make sure that you have inbound links to your site in order to help it rank and get higher PageRank.

How Guest Blogging efficiently Boosts reliability



Guest blogging is very helpful to building brand awareness, extending market reach, and boosting your authority. Regular and excellence guest blogging helps boost authority in four major ways:

•    Stronger online occurrence

•    enlarged authority in industry-related topics

•    Additional influence in link building & SEO

•    Expanded audience base

Guest blogging provides a win-win state from both parties involved. With that being said, poorly executed guest blogs can have a negative involve on your online status. Mastering guest blogging techniques is something content writers and marketers should pay close attention to. 

Mastering Guest Posting 

Guest blogging boosts reliability only when done productively and competently. To ensure that the guest post you make on a blog actually aids credibility building, follow these tips:

1. Choose Where to Post cautiously 


Flickr:  fotofish

Accept in mind that you want followers of the blog where you send guest posts to follow you, too. Selecting a well-liked blog will help you come in contact with high quality audience. The importance of wide research in this area cannot be overstated.

Research will help you find the most popular blogs in your aim industry. Many top bloggers do not accept guest posts and those who do need strict adherence to their terms and conditions.  Research to find out which top bloggers accept posts from guest bloggers and what their requisites and conditions are. You may also come across some not-so-famous bloggers with a high excellence audience who accept guest posts.

2. Analyze the Blog

Flickr:  NetMinder IG

Once you’ve decided the blog you want to guest post on, it helps to recognize dynamics of the target audience on that blog. Go through the comments and feedback posted by followers of the blog to estimate their meeting level.

Choose a small but more engaged audience over a large but quiet group. Engaged viewer’s share more frequently, provide feedback, and comment enthusiastically.  Also note how often posts are made on the blog. Daily posts tend to crowd a blog and followers will pay less attention to a guest post. Blogs that get updated with new posts once or twice a week will reduce internal competition and allow more revelation. 

3. create Contact with the Blogger 

Flickr: 

Top bloggers receive hundreds of requirements everyday. Master your sales pitch to make sure that all your research does not go to waste. Maintain a well written portfolio that does the selling for you. List similar work you’ve done and don’t forget to talk about your credentials.

•    Send out a modified email with a short, straightforward subject line.

•    Talk to the blogger about his previous posts, things that appealed to you, things that you found useful and project yourself as a regular follower of the blog.

•    If you have a topic in mind, tell the blogger how such a topic would ask to his followers. If you have no topic in mind, express  interest in writing a guest post and ask what themes they prefer.

•    Make a fleeting mention of your credentials. Don’t over do it, but you need to convince the blogger that your knowledge of the topic stems from your relation to the industry.

•    Make your offer. Talk about links and terms and conditions.

4. Nail the Post  

Flickr:  jeff_golden

After all the research and plunging it is time to submit a winning guest post.

•    Keep your content educational, unique, & interesting

•    Unless otherwise specified, include a minimum of 1000 words

•    Use good fashioned humor, puns, & trending subjects to keep the audience engaged

•    Craft a catchy title

•    Use related images to increase your credibility and reputation as a guest blogger

•    Don’t be selfish – blatantly selling your own business on a guest blog is not acceptable
The only selling that you should do while guest blogging is the insertion of a well written and attractive author biography. The bio should reflect your area of expertise. Keep the language professional and include a photograph for enhanced credibility.

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Tips to plan for a Future without Cookie Tracking


From a digital practitioner point of view “do not track” is the least of my worries but future news about Microsoft and Google pursuing cookie-less tracking capabilities indicates to me that education on how digital information is collected and shared will become even more significant in the near future.
 
Rather than panicking, there is a lot we can do today to enact guiding principles that will likely ease a change into tighter privacy controls in the future.

Education

One of the main problems facing digital marketing and analytics practitioners will be education. The industry has evolved so quickly that much of the technology that we rely on every day is likely taken for decided.

Personalization is one such area that relies on tracking, profiling, and delivering a lot of information about visitor preferences and behavior, which many of us likely take for decided.
One might fight that personalization is a byproduct of contextual advertising, and without underlying tracking technologies, wouldn't be possible to deliver.

Teasing apart a key delivery machine such as a session or persistent cookie will be very challenging, but explaining the significance of cookies and their usage to visitors and customers even more so.

What can you do to get ready?

1. Ensure your privacy policy is up to date and fully clear.
2. Explain what tracking technologies are used .
3. What cookies are working and for what reason.

Procedure

It’s probably safe to say that aside from a few exact highly-regulated industries and regions, most digital marketing practitioners don’t spent too much time or due industry in reviewing data usage models with third-party vendors and their technology.
Regulators focus both on collection and usage of data in these scenarios, mainly when third parties are involved because in many cases, these partners assume ownership of the data collected on your digital properties. This is the same reason why many browsers repeatedly block third-party cookies, to ensure data collection services and the usage of guest information are being entrusted to the right recipients.

What can you do to get ready?

4. Explain how data collected is used.
5. Explain how disabling functionality may affect user experience or functionality.
6. Ensure correlating verbiage between your privacy policy and suitable use policy are complementary.

Consent

In my view, this is where most of the opportunity is for much of North America. Very few companies really gather consent in a clear and concise manner.
To be brutally honest, most of us think that relying on a single line radio box at the bottom of a registration page, with a link to a hundred page disclosure is suitable. From a legal standpoint, it probably will cover you from any proceedings, but from a customer experience perspective, hundreds of pages of disclosure tend to make the average Joe either uninterested or a little paranoid.

What can you do to prepare?

7. Civilize your terms and conditions. Less legalese and more transparency.
8. Divide your service level agreement and delivery conditions from your data consent.
9. begin ways visitors and customers can opt-into and out of technology that enables digital marketing and personalization quickly and easily.

Conclusion

Think about the steps you can take today to inspire a greater confidence in your digital business and marketing hard work today. Sometimes little things go a long way to earn the value and trust of visitors and customers, making the impact of future technology tracking capabilities or narrow guidelines easier to transition into.

Google Increases Locations Serving Search requirements


The study reports Google improved the number of locations serving search requests from less than 200 to more than 1,400 between October 2012 and July 2013. In addition, they have also stretched the number of ISPs used from just over 100 to more than 850.

As reported in the study:
Over the past 10 months, Google search has noticeably increased the number of sites around the world from which it serves client queries, repurposing accessible infrastructure to change the physical way that Google processes web searches, according to a new study from USC.

Most of this expansion is simply Google using client networks that it already relied on for hosting content like YouTube videos and repurposing them to deliver faster responses to user requests for search queries.

The study’s lead author and USC PhD student Matt Calder explains it by saying:
Google previously delivered YouTube videos from within these client networks, but they’ve abruptly extended the way they use the networks, turning their content-hosting communications into a search infrastructure as well.

Why is this significant?

While you may be reading this and asking, “Why is this news?” it’s significant because it shows that search is still a high priority for Google while it expands in different directions.
Google still values the search knowledge of its end users; otherwise they wouldn’t be making this kind of investment if search wasn’t still a critical part of their business.

The strategy seems to have profit for web users, ISPs and Google, according to the team. Users have a better web browsing experience, ISPs lower their operational costs by keeping more traffic local, and Google is able to deliver its content to webusers earlier.
Rest guaranteed that Google hasn’t forgotten where they came from. Delivering the best search experience to users is still a top priority, as this study indicates.

Monday, October 28, 2013

Matt Cutts about SEO and Future of Google Search

latest google updates

Matt Cutts kicked off day two at Pubcon with another of his signature keynotes, dispelling myths, talk about spammers and about Jason Calcanis’ keynote from day one, at the influence of the audience.

First, Cutts spoke about Google’s “Moonshot changes,” which he bust down into these areas:


•    Knowledge graph
•    Voice search
•    Conversational search
•    Google now
•    Deep Learning

He exposed that Deep Learning is the ability to make relationships between words and apply it to more words, and how it can help improve search and the nuances of search queries.
Deep Learning in Regular and Voice Search

He explained that voice search is varying the types of search queries people use, but also that it can be refined without repeating earlier parts of the user’s search queries. It does this when it knows the user is still penetrating the same topic, but drilling down to more details.


Next up, Cutts spoke about Hummingbird and he feels that a lot of the blog posts about how to rank with Hummingbird are not that applicable. The fact is, Hummingbird was out for a month and no one noticed. Hummingbird is above all a core quality change. It doesn’t impact SEO that much, he said, despite the many blog posts claiming otherwise.
Of most interest to some SEOs is that Google is looking at softening Panda. Those sites caught in grey areas of Panda--if they are quality sites--could see their sites start ranking once more.

Google is also looking at boosting authority throughout authorship. We have seen authorship becoming more and more significant when it comes for search results and visibility in those results; Cutts confirmed this is the direction in which Google will continue to move.
Google on Mobile Search Results

Next, he discussed the role of smartphones and their shock on search results. This is completely an area SEOs need to continue to focus on, as it is clear that sites that are not mobile-friendly will see a negative impact on their rankings in the mobile search results.

Smartphone ranking will take numerous things into account, he explained:

•    If your phone doesn’t display Flash, Google will not illustrate flash sites in your results.

•    If your website is Flash heavy, you need to consider its use, or ensure the mobile version of your site does not use it.

•    If your website routes all mobile traffic to the homepage rather than the internal page the user was attempting to visit, it will be ranked lower.

•    If your site is slow on mobile phones, Google is less likely to rank it.

Cutts was attractive clear that with the significant increase in mobile traffic, not having a mobile-friendly site will seriously impact the amount of mobile traffic Google will send you. Webmasters should begin prioritizing their mobile strategy immediately.

Penguin, Google’s Spam Strategy & Native Advertising

Matt next talked about their spam strategy. When they initially launched Penguin and the blackhat webmaster forums had spammers bragging how they weren’t touched by Penguin, the webspam team’s answer was, “Ok, well we can turn that dial higher.” They upped the impact it had on search results. Cutts said that when spammers are posting about wanting to do him physically harm, he knows his spam team is doing their job well.

He did say they are continuing their work on some specific keywords that tend to be very spammy, including “payday loans,” “car insurance,” “mesothelioma,” and some porn keywords. Because they are highly profitable keywords, they attract the spammers, so they are working on
Spam networks are still on Google’s radar and they are still bringing them down and taking action against them.


For PageRank devotees, there is some bad news. PageRank is updated internally inside Google on a daily basis and every three months or so, they would push out that information to the Google toolbar so it would be visible to webmasters. sadly, the pipeline they used to push the data to the toolbar broke and Google does not have anyone working on fixing it. As a result, Cutts said we shouldn’t wait for to see any PageRank updates anytime soon--not anytime this year. He doesn’t know if they will fix it, but they are going to judge the impact of not updating it. The speculation that PageRank could be retired is not that far off from the truth, as it currently stands.

Communication with Webmasters, Rich Snippets, Java & Negative SEO

Google continues to boost their communication with webmasters. They made new videos covering malware and hacking, as Google is seeing these problems more and more, yet not all webmasters are understandable about what it is and how to fix it. They are working on with more concrete examples in their guidelines, to make it easier for people to determine the types of things that are causing ranking issues and point webmasters in the right direction to fix it.

Cutts worried that he is not the only face for Google search. They have 100 speaking events per year and do Hangouts on Air to educate webmasters. They hold Webmaster Office Hours, to boost communication and give users the chance to engage and ask questions of the search team.

Google is becoming smarter at being able to read JavaScript, as it has absolutely been used for evil by spammers. However, Cutts cautions that even though they are doing a better job at reading it, don’t use that as an excuse to create an entire site in JS.

Matt also says negative SEO isn’t as common as people consider and is often self-inflicted. One person approached Matt to say a competitor was ruining them by pointing paid links to their site. Yet when he looked into it, he exposed paid links from 2010 pointing to their site, and said there was no way competitors would have bought paid links back in 2010 to point to their site, since. the algorithm punishing paid links wasn’t until a couple years after those paid links went live.

The Future of Google Search: Mobile, Authorship & Quality Search Results

On the future of search, he again stressed the importance of mobile site usability. YouTube traffic on mobile has skyrocketed from 6 percent two years ago, to 25 percent last year, to 40 percent of all YouTube this year. Some countries have more mobile traffic than they do desktop traffic. Cutts reiterated, “If your website looks bad in mobile, now is the time to fix that.”

Google is also working on machine learning and training their systems to be able to understand and read at an elementary school level, in order to improve search results.

Authorship is another area where Google wants to develop, because tying an identity to an authorship profile can help keep spam out of Google. They plan to squeeze up authorship to combat spam and they found if they removed about 15 percent of the lesser quality authors, it dramatically increased the presence of the better quality authors.


During Q&A, Cutts discussed links from press release sites. He said Google recognized the sites that were press release syndication sites and simply discounted them. He does stress that press release links weren’t penalized, because press release sites do have value for press and marketing reasons, but those links won’t pass PageRank.
In closing, Cutts said they are keeping a close eye on the mix of organic search results with non-organic search results

Sunday, October 27, 2013

YouTube May begin a Commercial-Free Music Subscription Service by End of Year

google news
Rumors are flying this week about the chance YouTube may launch a subscription-based music streaming service to compete with Spotify before the end of the year.

According to the NYTimes , the subscription could cost $10 a month and grant access to videos on demand without advertising interruptions. Users would have the choice of watching the video or simply listening to the track.

No doubt this new service will be primed for the mobile user, as TechCrunch recently reported YouTube’s mobile traffic was at 40 percent, up appreciably from 6 percent in 2011. 

Billboard.com speculated the YouTube service might offer "offline cacheing of songs and videos so users can listen on their mobile devices even when they're not connected or when they're trying to save on bandwidth costs or battery consumption." 

This is a probable situation, as YouTube recently announced it would provide offline viewing to its mobile app users starting in November. 

Billboard also reported that YouTube would already have all the licenses it needs for a service like this, including from Warner Music Group, Sony Music activity and Universal Music Group. According to Billboard, the licenses were obtained through Google as it prepared to launch the Google Play Music All Access service earlier this year.

It’s also believed there will be a free part to this potential music video service, which will likely be “unlimited, on-demand access to full tracks on all platforms, with mobile,” Billboard said.
The free version will also likely include ads, which might just be the boost YouTube needs, as comScore reported AOL was on peak for ad impressions in September, not YouTube.

If YouTube offers a music streaming service, it wouldn’t be the only move by the video stage to further monetize through subscriptions. YouTube announced this week it will extend its subscription-based channel service to all video creators in good standing, with more than 10,000 subscribers, who meet their location and other qualifying criteria. They began piloting the service in May.

YouTube declined to comment directly on its plans, but said in a statement: "We're always working on new and better ways for people to enjoy YouTube content across all screens, and on giving partners more opportunities to reach their fans. However, we have nothing to announce at this time."

Friday, October 25, 2013

The worth of Referrer Data in Link Building


 Google has shut down link networks and Matt Cutts continues to make videos on what types of guest blogging are OK.  If links were quiet, would Google actually put in this attempt?  Would anyone get an “unnatural links” warning?

The fact is, links matter.  The death is in links that are easy to control.  Some may say link building is dead but what they mean is, “The easy links that I know how to build are dead.” 
.
The worth Of Referrer Data

The question is, why is referrer data useful?  Let's think about what Google's been impressive us about precious links: they are those that you would build if there were no engines.  So where are we going to find the links we'd be happy about if there were no engines?  Why, in our traffic, of course.

Apart from the truth that traffic is probably one of, if not the best, pointer of the quality and relevancy of a link to your site, your traffic data can also help you find the links you didn't know you had and what you did to get them. 

Referrers To Your Site

When you look to your referrer data, you're looking for a few easy signals.  Here's what you're looking for and why:

1.    Which sites are directing traffic to you?  Discovering which sites are directing traffic to you can give you a recovered idea of the types of sites you should be looking for links from . You may also find types of sites you didn't wait for driving traffic. This happens a lot in the SEO realm, but noticeably can also happen in other niches.  Here, you can often find not only opportunities, but relevancies you might not have predicted.

2.    What are they linking to?  The most excellent link building generates links you don't have to actively build. The next best are those that drive traffic.  We want to know both. In looking through your referrer data, you can find the pages and information that appeal to other website owners and their visitors.  This will tell you who is linking to you and give you ideas on the types of content to focus on creating.  There's also nothing stopping you from contacting the holder of the site that sent the initial link and informing them of an updated copy or other content you've created since that they might also be involved in.

3.    Who are they influential with?  If you know a site is sending you traffic, logically you can imagine the people who visit that site are also interested in your content (or at least more likely to be interested than standard mining techniques.  Mining the followers of that publisher for social connections to get your content in front of them is a way that can increase your success rate in link strategies ranging from guest blogging to pushing your content out via Facebook paid advertising.  Admittedly, this third area of referrer data is more akin to refining a standard link list, but it's likely a different audience than you would have encountered .

As I noted above, I plan to use the term referrer data loosely.  As if point three wasn't free enough, we're going to quickly cover a strategy that ties nicely with this: your competitor's referrer data.
Contestant Data

You maybe can't call up a participant and ask them for their traffic referrer data .  For the rest of us, I highly recommend pulling backlink referrer data for your competitors using one of the many enormous tools out there.  I tend to use Moz Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO personally, but there are others.

What I'm interested in here are the URLs competitors link to.  While the homepage can capitulate interesting information, it can often be onerous to weed through and I generally relegate that to different link time frames. 

Generally, I will put together a list of the URLs linked to, and then review these as well as the pages linking to them.  This helps give us an idea of possible domains to target for links, but more importantly, they can let us know the types of applicable content that others are linking to.
If we join this information with the data collected above when removal our referrer data, we can be left with more domains to seek links on and broader ideas for content creation. 

 You'll perhaps also find other ways the content is being linked to. Do they make top lists?  Are they producing videos or whitepapers that are garnering links from authority sites?  All of this information meshes together to make the energies you put into your own referrer mining more effective, allowing you to produce a higher number of links per hour than you'd be able to get with your own.

Is This It?

No.  While mining your referrer data can be a great source of information concerning the types of links you have that you should be seeking more of, it's limited to the links and traffic sources you already have.  It's a lot like looking to your Analytics for keyword ideas . It can only tell you what's working of what you have already. 

A diversified link profile is the key to a well long term strategy.  This is just one method you can use to help find what works now and keeps those link achievement rates up while exploring new techniques.

Why No PageRank Update until now

PageRank hadn’t been updated for some months and Matt Cutts hinted that PageRank “on track to go away a little bit” in a new webmaster help video. In his keynote at PubCon in Las Vegas, Cutts exposed the reason why PageRank hasn’t been updated and why it likely won’t be updated for a while – if ever.
 
Internally, PageRank updates on a daily basis and every so often, Google would push out the PageRank data to the Google toolbar through a pipeline . The reason we haven’t seen a new PageRank update newly is because the PageRank pipeline broke, so while the PageRank data internally continues to update as it should, webmasters eager to get a fresh look at 
PageRank data are out of luck.

Cutts also revealed they do not have anyone at present working on updating the pipeline and confirms we won’t see a PageRank update anytime this year. They are evaluating it to see if they require make a fix to update PageRank publicly next year.

Many webmasters still obsess over PageRank data, but the truth it hasn’t been updating since early this year means that webmasters have been less dependent on using it as an SEO tool of value. While Google continues to update the algorithm and penalize sites, webmasters can’t use it to spot check if a site has been penalized, as they could in years past. 

Fewer users are using the Google toolbar in Internet Explorer. So fewer people are seeing the data at all. There are still a lot of SEO tools that use and display PageRank information for sites and use it as a metric, mainly in tools that are gauging potential link values.

While it isn’t established we will never see a PageRank update ever again, the fact we will only have a single PageRank update in 2013 and Google isn’t working on a pipeline fix makes it less likely PageRank will be updated or a valuable tool for webmasters going forward.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

The shock of Penguin 2.1

seo tips

On October 4th, Matt Cutts announced the release of Penguin 2.1.Similar to previous Penguin updates;

This post is planned to give you a peek behind the ended, into the world of Penguin. I will focus on three different websites, with three different outcomes.

A Penguin Recovery during the 2.1 Update:

The company was initially hit by a previous Penguin update, but late tackling their link issues as they worked on technical problems and content issues.
During late spring and summer, unnatural links were detached as much as possible, while links that could not be manually removed were disavowed. By the way, that’s the come up to I recommend. I’m not a big fan of disavowing all bad links, and I never have been.

Based on links downloaded from Google Webmaster Tools, Majestic SEO, and Open Site Explorer, the company tackled its unnatural link state the best it could. Now they just needed another algorithm update to see if their hard work paid off.

 I advise to any company hit by an algorithm update that they should keep driving ahead as if they weren’t hit. Keep producing great content, keep leveraging social to get the word out, keep building natural links, etc.

Key Takeaways:

•    Move quickly and keep a strong focus on what you need to tackle link-wise. Even though this company recovered, it delayed its Penguin work for some time.

•    Be thorough. Don’t miss links you need to nuke. Penguin is algorithmic and there is a threshold you need to pass.

•    Remove as many unnatural links as you can manually, and then disavow the rest.

2. A Penguin 2.0 and 2.1 grouping Punch

You wouldn’t think a Penguin can pack a grouping punch, but it has in several situations I’ve analyzed recently and worse, this was after thinking they addressed their unnatural link problem thoroughly.

After getting pummeled by Penguin 2.0 on May 22nd, the business gathered its troops, thought they identified all of their unnatural links, and worked hard on removing them. After what seemed to be a thorough attack, they eagerly awaited another Penguin update. When Penguin 2.1 was announced by Matt Cutts, they watched their reporting with intense focus, only to be thoroughly disappointed with the outcome. They got hit even worse.


The Second Penguin Hit

Quickly reviewing the site’s link profile exposed a problem: companies put a stake in the ground and remove as many unnatural links as they can at a given point in time. They don’t continue analyzing their links to see if more unnatural links pop up and that’s a dangerous mistake. 

I saw many unnatural links in their profile that were first found during the summer and fall of 2013. Many showed up after their Penguin work had been completed. Those links are what got them hit by Penguin 2.1.

Fresh Unnatural Links Caused the Penguin 2.1 Hit:

 Don’t think you are done with your link removals because you have a spreadsheet from a few months ago. You need to repeatedly review your link profile to identify potential problems. If this company had done that, they would have picked up many additional unnatural links showing up this summer and fall, and dealt with them so. I believe if they did, they could have avoided the nasty one-two punch of Penguin.

Key Takeaways:

•    Your Penguin work is continuing. Don’t drop the ball.
•    Have your SEO continually monitor your link profile for unnatural links (whether that’s an internal SEO, agency, or consultant).
•    The one-two punch of Penguin is killer (and can be backbreaking).
Unnatural links have an uncanny way of replicating across low-quality sites and networks. I have clearly seen this during my Penguin analyses. Beware.

Summary: Penguin 2.1 Bringeth and Taketh Away

If you’ve been impacted by Penguin 2.1, you want to download and analyze your inbound links, flag unnatural links, take out as many as you can manually, and then disavow what you can’t remove. As I mentioned in the second case above, don’t stop analyzing your links once the primary phase has been completed. repeatedly monitor your link profile to make sure additional unnatural links don’t appear. Remember, another Penguin update might be right around the corner.

Social Media Is The Best Way To get High Value Links


Social media and search engine optimization are two of the best ways to get traffic and spotlight for your website. Combined, they can create striking results. SEO came to the forefront in the past decade as websites continued to testing with new methods of boosting traffic and sales. 

On the other hand, social media is all about creating a relationship with your followers, including accessible and potential clients. When it comes to content creation, promotion, outreach, goal tracking, branding, and other essential sales functions, social media can be a influential ally. Combining social media with you existing SEO plan and you can achieve much more!

How Social Media Influences SEO

 
With the rising influence of social networking websites and online marketing today, combining your SEO strategy with social media is a elegant step. SEO helps boost your website’s revelation, traffic, and profits. Adding social media marketing to your SEO strategy can bring a welcome transform in terms of popularity and traffic – in fact, nearly 70% of effective SEO efficiently involve social media in one or more ways.
   
Having more followers on social networking websites directly influences SEO. However, simply having more faction does not guarantee effective link building. Websites today are essential to have authority and influence over their followers to make an impact and boost their Klout score. The better control and authority websites have over their followers, the higher their probability of receiving quality back links. Investing in social media and SEO allows websites to tackle both problems with the same solution.

Apart from helping boost web traffic and sales, a presence in social media can lead to improved publicity as your followers continue to promote your brand. This boost in attention and online exposure can get you better back links and instantly affect your web traffic. Instead of simply focusing on SEO and social media individually, integrating the two processes can make an effective and long lasting cycle of link building. Broaden your SEO strategy to include social media and you can make a strong online presence.

Conventional methods of link building are made more effectual by using promoted social media posts. One of the best ways to leverage this is to create successful and engaging content that holds your readers’ interest. With high quality content, you are more likely to be shared and thus promote your brand.
Determining the True worth of Links

One of the biggest challenges in link building is choosing the right links. Poor class links are often worse than no links at all. There are numerous methods to determine the value of a link. These measurements and metrics boil down to three factors: the domain, the page, and potentially negative signs.

When considering domain level factors to assess links, you must look at parameters like the domain’s power, reliability, authenticity, search engine rankings, site indexing, traffic, age, and the total number of incoming links that the entire website receives.

When it comes to assessing each page on the site, you must consider factors like search engine rankings, page rankings, inward links, external link attributes, quality of content, post of links, presence of anchor text, complexity in pursuing links, as well as durability.

Some of the negative signs you should look out for include presence of paid links, an excess number of outbound linking, as well as the presence of any spam linking.
How to Get High Value Links 

Once you recognize how to look for the right types of links, the questions arise – where do you start? The real challenge lies in getting those trendy websites and page back links that can easily boost your web traffic. Some of the best places to look for high value links include advanced search queries on Google, removal pages on web directories, Twitter, and Google Alerts.

You can also find great links from related foreign websites that cover the same niches as you. Studying the linking and marketing relationships of your competitors and leading organizations can give also you a decent insight into where you can begin link building.

The increasing occurrence of social media in the everyday lives of customers has created a new opening for marketing and outreach. With the right techniques, you can integrate social media marketing into your standard SEO practices and reap the profit of both.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Google Analytics-URL target Goals

seo tips

Google Analytics (GA) really has a lot more helpful features than you might think. So many companies use the few tabs  and just put the rest on the back burner.

 URL target Goals is one of the features that isn’t a top precedence for many companies, yet can be very useful. If you’ve seen this option but never taken the time to figure out why it matters or how it works, now is the time to take on the confront!

How URL end Goals Work and How to Set Them Up       
          
The URL Destination Goals choice is a great way to see if your online marketing efforts are really giving you any results. There are many different types of Goals you can include, but URL Destination Goal is maybe the easiest to use. 

This exacting Goal will tell you whenever someone has visited a particular page on your site. This gathers data that you can later track and decide which of your marketing efforts are working and which ones are falling short.

Fully understanding how it all works is probably easiest if you set up a Goal. Here are the steps to make it happen:

Step #1: Go to your GA and click on your aim website. Click on the Admin button.

Step #2: Click the “Create a Goal” button in the upper right hand corner.

Step #3: You will then be able to enter in the Goal Description so you can stay planned in case you want to have more than one Goal. Click “Destination” and then “Next Step.”

Step #4: The next section is goal details, and it will ask for the URL where users will land when they have finished the goal . You should enter whatever comes after your domain name in the full URL. There is also a fall down menu on this same page where you should choose “Equals.” If you don’t have an exact URL, choose “Begins With” or “Regular Expression.”

Step #5 (Optional): Once you’re finished creating your Goal, you have two elective choices. First, you can change your URL destination goal into a funnel, which works great if you have 3 or 4 steps in your checkout process. This can help you see where most of your conversions are lost in your multi-step process. Second, you can add a monetary value to your Goal so you can see exactly how much money you earn for each conversion. 

 You can make up to 4 sets of Goals for each field you have in your GA and then can add 5 Goals to each of these sets . You can’t delete a Goal once it starts bringing in data, but it is probable to neutralize it. In short, choose your Goals cautiously!

What to Track with a URL Destination Goal

What you should track with Goals all depends upon your company. Where do you want people to change, and what marketing aspects are in question? Are you loosing clients before they convert, but aren’t sure where? Here are some of the most accepted areas to track.
Free Trial Sign Ups & Downloads

Most companies want to make sure their freebies are making a difference. Even more than this, companies wants to know how many people from their free trials really come back and convert. If you have a page that thanks someone for downloading a free EBook or a free trial, consider putting that URL as your goal and then comparing those numbers with the number of people that convert after a 30-day period.
Sales

This is one of the most accepted goals. As discussed above when setting up your goals, you have 2 choices: make a funnel to track your customers through each step, or simply add in a URL of the thank you page that people see after they’ve made a purchase.
 
Content Form Fill-Outs

If your business is all about grabbing those leads, you might want to track if someone fills out a form to get more information about your company. This is a accepted goal for a service oriented businesses. In other words, your site doesn’t really sell product or service, rather customers fill out a form to request a quote or something similar.

Your company might also consider tracking how many people opt-in to your mailing list, fill out sign-up or registration forms, or first time commenters on your blog.  

Check Your Conversion Data: Wait a few days before checking your data. Visit your Explorer tab in GA and then click on the Goal set you formed. You will then see a nice table with all the numbers for your Goal. Track these numbers over a few months before you start making conclusions about what is the most valuable method in your marketing plan and what can go.