'Net Features : wm-searchmarketing

Avoid Google Penguin 2.0 Slowdowns

Amberly Dressler — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:35:00 GMT

How will Penguin 2.0 affect your website? How will you measure the impact? If you’re like most businesses, you’ll check your site’s search engine rankings and make assumptions based on where it stands. The team at Fruition thinks there’s a better way.

Its Google Penalty Checker tool (registration required) allows website owners to determine if a particular Google update (because Penguin 2.0 won’t be the last) had a positive or negative effect on their website. The tool is easy to use, provides immediate results and is free for a limited time.

Fruition reports that the Google Penalty checker, which requires a connection with your Google Analytics account, is fully compliant with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and picks up even the smallest changes in a Google update allowing website owners to determine if they were impacted or not.

Protect your investment, keep up with Google changes and avoid Google penalization by trying the Google Penalty checker.

4 Backlink Myths Busted

Administrator — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:30:00 GMT

:: Travis Bliffen, Seo Proz ::

SEO is the magic of the digital marketing world with experts promising to pull rabbits out of hats for first-page search engine results. But as search engine providers continuously update their ranking algorithms, SEO success becomes an elusive and shifting science - even for those with all the tricks. So, how can you separate fact from illusion? Let's start by busting four backlink myths.

Myth: All backlinks should be created within content that is relevant to the page being optimized.

When a page or content goes “viral,” it is rapidly shared across both new and established blogs, social networks and the net as a whole. As a result, backlinks are created on a range of sites, many of which have absolutely no relevance to the content being linked. Therefore, even if your content is about, say, puppy dogs, if you create a link on a high-quality site about apples, the backlink is still advantageous for your search engine ranking. This doesn’t mean that spamming links all over the place is a good idea though. Natural link building involves creating backlinks in a manner that does not appear spammy, because the links are relevant in some way, but not necessarily to the content of the page. In our puppy dogs and apples example, perhaps there is a forum post where an apple grower is having trouble with his dog. While the content of the backlink site isn’t about the subject-linked content, the link would still seem natural and relevant.

Myth: All backlinks should be from PR2+ sites or better.

When we look at the nature of viral content yet again, we see links going up in all manner of places. You can’t stop PRzero sites from linking your content any more than you can force a PR9 site to link it. Nonetheless, the PRzero backlink is not going to sandbag your content’s search engine rank. When creating backlinks, the focus should not be the on PR status of the site, but the quality of the link itself. All backlinks should be considered from the perspective of a Web-goer. Ask yourself, if SEO didn’t exist, and all of my links were legitimate, “real” people, rather than crawler bots, would this link be something I’d click or does it look like spam? If you wouldn’t click it, don’t create the backlink. Common sense viewers generally won’t click links within sites that appear to be less than reputable. This may include porn sites, casinos, make-money-fast scams and link farms.

Myth: You should create this many backlinks.

The suggested perfect number of backlinks to improve search engine ranking varies, but more often than not it’s a lot—or as many as you possibly can. Truthfully, though, just how many backlinks you should create is a trick question, because you shouldn’t be creating them all. Viral content does not become viral because the creator links it hundreds of times, it becomes viral because the content is timely, high quality, and useful or interesting. The same way creating backlinks with the same anchor text every time or linking from the same site repeatedly can make a link look like spam, being the only person creating backlinks can as well. Instead of aiming to create backlinks, focus on creating content that encourages other people to do it for you.

Myth: High-link velocity will hurt your search engine ranking.

Falling under the old quality-is-better-than-quantity adage, it’s often suggested that backlink creation should be staggered as rapid link velocity makes a site look like spam. When content goes viral, however, it is indeed rapidly linked from all over the place, so if this rule is true, why aren’t all those pages sinking to the 150 page? While it is true quality counts more than quantity, if your backlinks are being followed and not just created it doesn’t matter how fast they appear. One hundred backlinks in 24 hours that nobody clicks might be seen as spam, but 100 backlinks that are getting active traffic are a seed to viral content. If your aim is to plant that seed, you need to mimic the process by which content becomes viral to the best of your ability. News and social signals play a massive role in the virility of content, so with a viral-style link building campaign, don’t forget to introduce the content to social networks and news feeds.

The truth about launching a successful SEO backlink campaign is just that, dismiss all the rules. Forget about the experts stabbing in the dark at the magic behind scoring the first page, and think like a real human being from the perspective of the people that you want to view your content. After all, it is people that make content go viral, and when content wins the people, it scores the first page of search engine results as a trophy.

Travis Bliffen is the founder of The Seo Proz a search marketing company located near Marion, IL. After working in the industry under the guidance of other search-marketing professionals, he launched The SEO Proz in early 2012. Since then he has worked with numerous local, national and international clients to improve their search rankings.

Move Search 2.0 to the Top of the Corporate Agenda

Administrator — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:25:00 GMT

:: By Simon Bain, Simplexo ::

We all misplace keys, phones, wallets, etc. Generally, when you lose something, it is only when you need it again that you notice its disappearance. Then, confusion, panic or fear may set in. You search high and low, retrace old steps and rack your brain trying to apply sensible logic to the situation, but often search in the most irrational of places. Did I leave my phone in the refrigerator?

All sorts of crazy scenarios go through your head, and then, when you’ve almost lost all hope - success - your keys turn up in the front door. Relief floods over you, bringing a wave of calm and normalcy back into your world.

There is nothing more satisfying than basking in the glory of finding something you lost. What happens when you next lose or can’t find your keys? Panic starts to set in, then your brain clicks into gear and remembers. Instead of going through all the emotions as before, you trace the steps back based on previous experiences and presto, no need for panic, you’re filled with a sense of calm having found the lost item. Why is this? Because as humans, we learn.

In fact if you think about it our entire life is dictated by searching, because without it we would not be ‘doing’ as most searches invariably lead to some sort of action.

But what happens if you substitute something tangible like your keys or wallet, for a document you saved on your computer?

We’ve all been there. You open up a word processor app, after searching for the file on the desktop. You then search for the template to use or the toolbar to click on to, or the file open button. All second nature, but what happens when we can’t find the document?

As with the keys and wallets, you go through the search and retrieval processes, until the familiar sensation of reward and relief comes over you when you eventually find it.

Now if this was to happen again, as mentioned with something tangible, you wouldn't necessarily go through the various processes until you locate the lost item. You've learned your lesson.

However, with computer search applications that is not the case. Unlike the human brain, search applications do not have the capability to learn, but this doesn't mean we can’t put processes into place to make search much more friendly and intuitive.

A revolution in thinking is here when it comes to search bringing Search 2.0.

Let’s take a moment to look at the concept of Advanced Search, which gives the participant a more tailor-made set of results against a request. In practice, this sounds great but we all know that the reality is instead of getting 6,000,000 results you might only get 2,678,988 - not exactly helpful. Imagine however, if a web search only found one result to every query instead of 6,000,000 or 2,678,988, and each answer was exactly what you needed.

That is the potential that semantic search technology holds. Is this a nirvana? A mirage? Or is it something we really need to address in the smart device era where users will simply not tolerate having to search through files, folders, emails and the like while they are on the move.

The drive for mobility is creating a revolution in search. However, we need to be clear that this revolution not only simplifies the search process, it must do so securely.

Online search engines familiar to the average consumer typically deploy so-called Boolean search techniques, in which the key words or phrases the user is looking for must be present in the underlying commands searched for. In Boolean search, the number of results delivered will therefore correspond to the number of instances a particular phrase occurs in the underlying data – in this case the World Wide Web.

This is why the name of a popular celebrity such as Lady Gaga retrieves 456,000,000 results when a more obscure example will achieve significantly fewer. The user has to determine which is the best answer to his query. I would call this self-search or self-filtering. When you are on the go this is simply not an option.

Semantic search technology, on the other hand, retrieves answers based not on specific words or phrases, but on the overall relevance to the query. It seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable database, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results.

As developers, we need to put this into practice, otherwise users will remain frustrated and searching will continue to be a huge pain-point. Map against this the need for a secure search application to see the imperative of delivering a 2.0 solution.

The benefit for users is clear: accurate information at one’s fingertips as needed either at the desktop, or as is increasingly the case, via smart devices securely and safely while on the move.

Businesses embracing this new search culture will benefit from having improved productivity, more effective communication and greater flexibility for employees.

There is no doubt that we are now seeing a radical change in the way people work, communicate, interact and by definition, search for information. Smart device penetration is set to continue unabated meaning that relevant, semantic search has to go mobile as well.

Now these might only be seen as baby steps, but they are steps in the right direction. The key to success is giving back the user those feelings of satisfaction and relief when finding something that was lost. The current processes are in place do provide this, but as technologists we should be striving to make searching that little bit easier.

About the Author: Simon Bain is the company founder, CTO and chief architect of Simplexo Ltd's software solutions.

Could Google+ Play a Role in the Upcoming Penguin Update?

Michael Garrity — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:05:00 GMT

On Friday morning, Matt Cutts, the person in charge of Google’s webspam team, announced via Twitter that the search engine would be rolling out the next generation, version 2.0, of its Penguin update (originally released in April of last year).

This update will likely have considerable ramifications on the way that Google sorts and ranks pages on its search engine results pages (SERPs), as these types of overhauls entail altering the search algorithm, as opposed to just an index refresh.

Penguin 2.0

The first Penguin update focused on black hat SEO and links/link quality, as part of the company’s apparent desire to keep "spammy" sites stuffed with low-quality links from reaching the upper echelons of the SERPs (or even the first couple of pages, for that matter). It’s been tweaked a few times since then, with the first refresh (Penguin 1.1, if you will) simply cleaning up and implementing the algorithm update in the way it indexes pages, and the second refresh adding the Disavow Links Tool, which puts the onus of identifying and removing bad links on the webmasters.

But this new update promises to be much more significant and should resonate more with all websites and webmasters. In a video released yesterday (see the bottom of this post), Cutts said that the upcoming Penguin update, which is expected in “a few weeks,” will likely go deeper and have more of an impact than Penguin 1.0, but didn’t really elaborate beyond that. He also explains that Google is looking to give special ranking "boosts" to sites that are authorities in a specific industry, community or space, meaning it will return those sites above loess authoritiative sites in related queries. He doesn't define how they will determine that authority, however.

Naturally, this has led many Web pros to wonder just what this new update will entail, and how it may affect their own performance in the SERPs. For now, all we can do is speculate.

What about Google+?

One likely scenario involves Google’s silently growing social network, Google+, which passed Twitter in Dec. 2012 to become the second largest online social network in terms of active monthly users (according to a Global Web Index study). Whereas Google started out by aggressively (over) marketing G+ when it first went live, the company has slowly backed off in favor of quietly integrating the social network with its myriad other products.

It wouldn’t be at all surprising, then, to see Google trying to incorporate G+ more intricately into its search engine, as well. And since the original Penguin was largely about links and link quality, one might expect Penguin 2.0 to put a special emphasis on links appearing on the social network. That is, content that gets linked to on or from Google+ will be weighted more heavily, or at least with more credibility, than if it were just a link on a random website or blog.

In other words, Google could end up viewing links that also appear somewhere on Google+ as being of a generally higher quality than others, so it may end up giving them a boost in the SERPs. And if that’s the case, it wouldn’t be surprising if Google Search also paid attention to the activity around links on Google+ (e.g. shares, +1s, etc.) in order to better determine just how “quality” they may actually be.

Should this end up being the case, it would mean that brands and content publishers, especially, will want to become more active on Google+, sharing links on the social network in order to give them more authority or credibility in the SERPs, especially if they expect these links to appear on other websites or blogs.

Of course, this is all just speculation, and Google is being, and will continue to be, quiet on the subject until the release of the new update, as it always is. I’m just saying, it would be an interesting way for the company to quietly nudge people toward using Google+ more often, although the downside would be the creation of an increasingly insular, exclusive “Google Universe” that may alienate Web professionals and users even more than it already has.

Bing Makes it Easier to Find People

Allison Howen — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:45:00 GMT

According to Bing, people are the second most searched for category on its search engine, and represent nearly 10 percent of all searches.

Because of this, the company has launched a new feature to its search engine called People Autosuggest, which enables users to find people faster from the search box.

For example, if you leverage Bing to search for a celebrity, politician, athlete or professional with a publicly available LinkedIn profile, Bing will provide a snapshot of information about that person (as well as other prominent people who share the same name) directly below the search bar. This makes it easier and faster to discover the exact person you are looking for, as well as increases the visibility of searched-for people.

Bing’s blog states that this feature not only makes it simple for users to keep tabs on their favorite celebrities or sports stars, but can also be used to learn more about someone’s professional background. Additionally, Bing notes that users should stay tuned for future updates to Snapshot (which is the center column of the search page that displays answers at a glance), as the company is “constantly expanding the number of available entities in Snapshot, including people, places and things.”

Session-Based Keyword Research

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 13 May 2013 19:15:00 GMT

Bing suggested a rather unique approach to keyword research that search engine optimizaiton professionals may seriously want to consider.

Keyword research is clearly important to the success of an SEO campaign as you need to know what content will attract users. But users aren't static (they don't search the same things over and over) - they're dynamic and your approach to keyword research, as well as content development strategies, should match.

Bing's suggestion is to supplement the keyword research you're currently engaged in and enhance with what it's calling session-based keyword research (instead of pure query-based model). While Bing throughout its post kept repeatedly and aggressively suggesting that no keyword tool exists (from any search engine) that would enable you to do this, it's doesn't take a visionary to see that Bing is obviously working on something for this implicit purpose.

The gist of the Bing keyword research approach is this - consider how your users search over an entire potential "session" with your brand. Bing provided a good example; a user that on one day searches for "adopt a dog" and the next day might search for "puppy training." There's a distinct progression in user behavior. When content marketers (and marketers in general) can expand their vision about the broader and longer experience of a user, they'll be better able to position their products, content and services to users when and how they might want them.

The suggestion also has ramifications for advertising. Brands that fit quite neatly in a particular category - a pet store for example - might soon see a tool (a Bing Ads keyword tool perhaps) which suggests a more comprehensive keyword flow and be able to opt directly into it for retargeting.

Bing’s Social Sidebar Gets Interactive

Allison Howen — Mon, 13 May 2013 17:47:00 GMT

Microsoft is making its search engine even more social, by allowing its users to comment and like stuff on Facebook directly from Bing.

The search engine’s social sidebar, which was launched last year, now allows users to view comments on relevant Facebook posts within the sidebar, as well as allows users to add their own comments or like posts without leaving Bing. This enables users to see what their Facebook connections might know about the topic that they are searching for and engage with them without leaving the search page.

Bing’s blog provides this example:

“Let’s say I’m searching for Beyoncé tickets because I know she is coming to town soon. I can see that my friend has recently posted that she has an extra ticket to the show. Now without leaving the Bing results page, I comment directly to her post letting her know that I’d love to join her for the concert. I’ve gone from simply browsing to attending a concert in just a few easy steps – all thanks to Bing.”

In order to leverage this interactive feature, users must connect their Facebook account with Bing, which can be done in the top right corner of the search engine.

Is there a POC in Your SEO Audit?

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 07 May 2013 19:05:00 GMT

SEO is becoming increasingly difficult by the day. To truly excel with the digital marketing tactic, it's essential to periodically audit the various elements of a website that may influence its ultimate success on the search results - particularly for those highly sought-after keywords (you know, the ones that your prospective visitors would actually use to find your website).

There's been a rise over the past few years of agencies offering their clients audits of those clients existing search engine optimization campaigns. While it's vital (I repeat, vital) to know what's working or not, too many of these audits are self-serving - to the agency - at best, and can be downright misguided when those performing the audit simply don't understand your business, its customers, or its competitors SEO strategies.

Again, audits are really important but you should not do so in a silo. What you should look for (or request from the agency performing the audit) are some benchmarks as that alone will provide the most valuable insights and ultimately the most benefit. Companies need a point of comparison (POC) to gauge their efforts. That POC should ideally be a competitor, and a competitor within your geographic market.

If you offer SEO services you might right now be fuming mad (that's double the work!) but in reality, you can't and shouldn't expect your clients (who will pay you good money) to make a decision based on half the SEO story. Buyers of SEO services need to understand how much improvement to their current efforts are required to beat the competition. If you can show them how low the hurdle is, just imagine how quickly they will sign on the dotted line.

Here are a few key essential SEO audit points and why it's important to provide a POC for each:

Keyword Focus: Most websites, particularly those on a smaller scale, focus on just a handful of keywords. Knowing what those keywords are (based on the research you can gain from popular keyword research tools) is important but if the competition has been engaged in SEO for some time, they may have discovered a few search terms that really, truly convert browsers into buyers. Knowing what search terms competitors are currently using therefore can prove exceedingly valuable when developing an SEO campaign. Don't accept a SEO keyword audit without knowing what your competitors are optimizing for today.

URL Structure: Yes, a well-organized website structure is important to a successful presence on the search engines - it's undeniably one of the most important variables in good on-site optimization. But unless you have thousands of web pages, there's really no reason you'd have an abnormal structure whatsoever (no complex folder hierarchies, or product parameters for example). It would be useful to know if competitors did have an URL structure problem though because then you'd have an opportunity to differentiate your digital presence from the perspective of the search engines.

Title Tags: SEO's need to do a better job of showing their clients what it is that they actually do (URL structure by the way isn't one of them as from a distance it seems rather simple - just change the name, right?). The best way to do that is to communicate the importance of title tags; and since they're visible on the search results to users this isn’t really too much to ask for from the SEO group performing the audit. If you can clearly express why your prospective clients method of title tag optimization isn't working, show them how their competitors too are doing it wrong, and how your approach to the practice is better, you’ve got a near fool-proof way to once again get that client on your side.

These are just three areas where I hope you can see that having a point of comparison in SEO audits is really important to the benefit you could derive from an SEO audit. Consider a few other elements - validated code, social media, mobile compatibility, code validation, and page load speed - and ask yourself, is this something that should if I were to show to my client, it would benefit from them knowing about? Remember that in the SEO industry, knowledge (and more of it) is power - the power to make the right decisions.

5 Reasons Your Search Traffic is Declining

Michael Garrity — Tue, 07 May 2013 18:27:00 GMT

Maybe it’s been happening over the past few weeks, or even months. Slowly, but surely, you’ve been watching your traffic numbers decline, despite not having changed much of anything about the way you publish content or optimize your website for the search engines.

Naturally, you’ll want to know exactly what’s going on and what’s causing this continual dip in traffic. For some problems, you may be able to look at your analytics platform to determine what content is seeing its traffic numbers decrease, which could help you clearly identify where you’re struggling.

However, in most cases, you’ll have to perform some kind of search result audit for your various keywords that will show you where you’re currently ranking on Google and its competitors for your most important keywords. Ultimately, this could reveal one (or more) issues that are holding you down in the SERPs and, thus, negatively affecting your traffic numbers.

But before you begin investigating, it might be helpful to know what you should be on the lookout for. So, here are the five most likely reasons that you’ve been seeing your website traffic decrease:

New Competition
(Too) many website owners and SEO professionals tend to a take an “it’s all about me” approach to their work, and when they start to have an issue like declining traffic, their initial instinct is to wonder what it is THEY are doing wrong and what THEY have to do to fix it. However, few immediately consider the possibility of a new website (or sites) that have moved into their niche and are luring away some of their traffic by offering comparable products or content. This is one of the reasons why conducting regular industry assessments and search audits is imperative.

Content is Out of Date
Every good content creator strives to make something evergreen that will last forever, so that visitors will consistently come to his or her website to read it. However, over time, the majority of content will become dated, and its value will begin to depreciate at a regular pace. One way to tell if your content isn’t as enticing to searchers as it used to be is to monitor that page’s analytics, and if something that used to get a consistently high influx of visitors now gets less and less, it’s likely that the content on the page is decreasing in value to most readers. A method for correcting this issue could be to produce a new, updated version of that content, and then to link to the new page on the old one.

Shifts in Algorithm Values
This is another instance where your decreasing traffic isn’t actually your fault. Occasionally, Google and the other search engines will alter their algorithms to give more weight to certain types of content for specific search terms. When that happens, images, videos, wiki pages or other content that is slightly different from standard Web pages may be given prominence over your site, which can have an effect on how much traffic you get from that search engine. If you notice that Google seems to favor certain types of content for one of your keywords or targeted search terms, maybe that means you should consider making a video or infographic the next time you consider writing a blog post about a that topic.

Caught Red Handed Being a Black Hat
And other times, SEOs are knowingly or unknowingly participating in nefarious “black hat” SEO tactics in order to move their sites higher up in the SERPs. Once Google and the others bust you – and they almost always will – they’ll penalize your site and send you way down in the rankings, and that will obviously affect your traffic. If you genuinely weren’t intending to be shady and just made a mistake, it’s important that you find out what your exact offense was and correct it as soon as possible, so that you can start trying to garner some good will with the search engines and make your way back up in the rankings.

They’re Just Not That into Your Content
However, the unfortunate truth is that much of the time, consumers just aren’t going to be that interested in the content that you’re publishing, meaning it’s not engaging or valuable enough to hold their attention and keep them coming back for more. And without engaging content, your traffic numbers are going to suffer. To rectify this problem, you should be aware of the top sites and blogs in your niche or industry, and take note of what they’re regularly publishing content about (in order to understand emerging trends) and what their readers are saying in comments sections and on social media sites to see what they’re asking for, so that you have a better idea of what content will be engaging and valuable to the visitors you want to attract.

BrightLocal Puts SEO Industry In Focus

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 07 May 2013 18:14:00 GMT

BrightLocal has released results from a survey which examines the health and nature of the local search engine optimization industry, revealing just what life's like for SEO's on the ground.

This is BrightLocal's second such survey of the industry (the first was released in July of 2011). Just over 1,400 SEO's responded to the survey, the majority of whom are SEO freelancers, small digital agencies and Web designers. The survey explore the size and turnover (revenue) of respondents companies, their clients and the industries they serve, marketing and sales, services and tasks, as well as respondents future outlook on the industry.

Highlights of the survey, available here, include:

- 82% of said they have between 1-5 practicing SEO's in their company.

- 70% of companies pay under $1000 per month for SEO services.

- 71% of SEOs handle 6 or more customers

- Just 14% of SEOs/agencies target 1 vertical industry

- 91% said word-of-mouth marketing brought in the most leads

- 32% of SEOs don’t make out bound sales enquiries (down from 46% in 2012)

- 91% of SEOs offer on-site optimization

- 82% of SEOs said that social media is an effective channel for local businesses

- 55% of SEOs say they find link building the most time consuming/tedious task they do

- 93% of respondents said they expect to grow their business in 2013

Don’t Let Your Social Media & SEO Take a Vacation

Administrator — Fri, 03 May 2013 12:39:00 GMT

:: By Chris Marentis, CEO of Surefire Social ::

While summer (or any off-season for a business) might represent a downtime, don’t send your SEO strategy on a short-term vacation. Instead, take some of the downtime in your own business to re-evaluate your approach and determine what is and isn’t driving new quality customers to your website and creating increased sales leads.

Review Site Performance

By using tools like Google Analytics and your CRM system you can identify trends, issues and opportunities when it comes to website traffic. Measuring unique visits, page traffic, lead conversion rate and the popularity of content like blog posts or landing page copy gives you the chance to make improvements.

Helping you send the right signals to Google for improved search visibility, Google’s Webmaster Tools offer you diagnostic reports that let you improve your site’s relationship with Google. This includes customizing important settings, specifying URL parameters, prioritizing sitelinks and more.

Based on these analytics, tweak content and keyword strategy as needed. If your website traffic is high but conversions are low, you should evaluate which type of Web searcher is actually finding your website. Make identifying keywords a part of your marketing strategy and ensure they appear on your website’s homepage. However, remember not to abuse keywords, as search engines penalize websites that overuse keywords. If you are using keywords that potential ready-to-buy customer would use to search for your business, you are likelier to attract quality leads.

Reassess Link Building Strategy

In order to boost website visibility and rank well in search engines, look at your link-building strategy. From a Google perspective, link building is about to shift entirely with the much-anticipated Penguin 2.0. Google is now discounting links if they don’t find them relevant and trustworthy.

These low quality links might include overuse of keywords, link buying or heavy interlinking of your own website. If you are guilty of the previously mentioned, start cleaning up links now before Penguin 2.0 is released and refocus on authoritative links like contributed content, blog posts, videos and reviews. Otherwise, the negative links could hurt your page rank and visibility in search results making it difficult for customers to find you.

Increase Social Media Sharing

Also, review how social media sharing, infographics, earned backlinks, site blog distribution and other content is helping you move to top of search results. Informative content including blog posts, how-to articles or photos and videos has the potential to be shared and even go viral and can bring more exposure to your business. This combination of SEO, social media and content creation is needed to send positive signals about your business to search engines. Don’t forget to share your earned links through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media for increased exposure.

Try to set up a system and a workable dashboard to look at the data on a regular basis. During the summer, reassess your website traffic by taking a close look at analytics available to you. Also, look at the technology and underpinning supporting your website to ensure code cleanliness and optimal site speed. Check that keywords and site structure are aligned with your business objectives and what products/services you are trying to rank well for in Google and other search engines and directories. With this analysis, you can create a plan to make any necessary updates to prepare for a busier fall and winter.

Regardless of your business type, different seasons might represent a lull but know that just because an SEO strategy worked in the past, it might not work in the future. It is important to continually reassess whether your approach to SEO is effective, reaching your targeted customers and making a strong impact on your bottom line.

CHRIS MARENTIS BIO

For nearly three decades, Chris Marentis, Founder and CEO of Surefire Social, has been responsible for driving innovation and sales growth for large media and e-commerce brands as well as start-ups. His notable career includes creating the foundational blueprints for online marketing, e-commerce and content branding for AOL's Interactive Marketing group, where he served as Senior Vice President. While CEO of Clearspring Technologies (now Add This), Marentis developed one of the most widely adopted venture-backed Web 2.0 content distribution technology platforms in the world.

6 SEO Game Changers to Know

Administrator — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:05:00 GMT

By Michael Marshall, Search Engine Academy of North Carolina

Important Developments in the History of Search and Where It’s Headed

When I started working in SEO, the Web was the Wild West of marketing. Twelve years ago, the most popular search engine was AltaVista, and most optimization work was made up of on-page factors. Paid search was ridiculously inexpensive, and websites had the power to dominate pages of organic search using fairly straightforward techniques. A page manager could watch his site ranking increase in less than an hour after making changes to a page — even for competitive key phrases. Looking back, it was a simpler time for Internet marketers.

The world of SEO has evolved over the years, awarding success to those who adapted — and failure to those who didn’t. Here is a brief history of the important changes in search, as well as an overview of what the future holds for SEO.

6 Important Changes in SEO

From sweeping Internet upheavals that threw the entire marketing industry for a loop (like the advent of social media) to more SEO-specific developments, like the introduction of instant search, the past two decades have dramatically transformed the world of Internet marketing. Here are six of the biggest changes to SEO:

1. Inbound linking:

The dominance, and later refinement, of inbound links created an entire cottage industry of link-building brokers and service providers as businesses scrambled to capitalize on this new element of search. It simultaneously made SEO more complex and ensured spam tactics were less effective.

2. Personalization of search:

This evolution in SEO eliminated the use of search engine rankings — what had been SEO’s flagship for measuring success. Without credible search engine rankings, traditional rank-checking methods were rendered futile, and identifying competitors became nearly impossible. The personalization of search also forced website owners to refine their content so that it was relevant semantically and would hold the interests of searchers.

3. Social media:

The influence of social media not only opened a new channel for marketing, but it also had a growing impact on organic results, which is still crucial to SEO today. This new aspect of marketing forced businesses to focus on user engagement and their online reputation — and to also offer a new wealth of information about consumers to marketers.

4. Search queries:

The introduction of instant search and auto suggest caused big changes in a search query’s behavior. Consequently, these new features then caused marketers to alter the process of deciding which queries to target, and in effect, changed the remainder of the SEO process. SEO specialists now think in terms of families of search queries, rather than isolated key phrases.

5. Crawlers:

Crawlers used to be slow in frequency and limited in what forms of content they could extract. Search result pages would experience huge fluctuations each month, giving rise to monikers like the “Google Dance.” Now, crawlers have improved in frequency, as well as in the type and amount of content they can extract — even getting data from Flash presentations.

6. Tags:

Tags, especially meta tags, have decreased in importance as search engines are now better at gathering signals from a website’s copy and a hyperlink’s structure between sites. Still, they’re not completely useless. Meta tags are now used to help with URL canonicalization problems, enhance search result listings, and improve click-through rates.

What’s to Come for Search

As the Internet continues to become more personalized, the ever-growing integration of technology with human biology and interaction will only continue to progress. It might sound a little abstract, but this sophistication in technology will make it possible to leverage natural forms of human communication, such as speech, gestures, facial expressions, visual focus, and emotions.

Searches triggered by speech are already on the rise. What if a user’s vocal tone was an added consideration to search? If search results became partially based on a speaker’s tone, marketers would need to “optimize” for yet another user-specific component of search. Or imagine a search query being triggered by facial expressions — marketers would then need to optimize for the facial component of a search as well.

How to Prepare for These Changes

There are companies that have gone out of business due to their failure to adapt. Back in 2003, during the Florida update — and more recently, during the Panda and Penguin updates — companies lost as much as 90 percent of their traffic overnight. Don’t let that happen to you.

So how do you prepare? For now, the better you can fine-tune your message and detail your knowledge of target audiences (psychographics, demographics, consumer motivations, social contexts, etc.), the more likely you will be able to leverage new modes of search when they do come.

More generally, marketers must make keeping up with developments in SEO a priority — whether that means attending industry conferences, like Pubcon and Digital Summit, or going to more focused venues for training. Reading information published by the search engines themselves, as well as industry publications like Search Engine Land, can also help marketers stay abreast of important changes.

Marketers must also focus on utilizing social media as originally as possible. Companies like Talking Moose Media are helping companies add a social media dimension to in-person events and meetings, boosting SEO and social media marketing efforts. It’s like augmented reality for marketing and events.

Ultimately, the key to keeping pace with SEO is a willingness to embrace change as the Web continues to evolve. Think of it this way: These dramatic changes to Google or other components of SEO that intimidate marketers are there to make consumers’ lives easier and businesses more profitable. They are, in reality, improvements to SEO — improvements that you can capitalize on if you’re prepared for them.

Michael Marshall is the lead instructor and owner of the Search Engine Academy of North Carolina. He has more than 24 years’ worth of experience in information technology, covering a wide range of specialties including web design, software engineering, ecommerce solutions, artificial intelligence, and Internet marketing. He is a member of the World Association of Internet Marketers and of SEO Professionals. Connect with him on Twitter and Google+.

3 Tips to Get Started on Mobile SEO

Michael Garrity — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 19:30:00 GMT

Optimizing your site for mobile search engines should certainly move to the top of your to-do list, if it hasn’t already. After all, it’s an easy and enticing activity for on-the-go consumers who may have a question about a product or service they're looking for, or need to find specific information about a business.

However, trying to meet mobile users where they’re searching is a bit trickier than your average run-of-the-mill desktop search engine optimization. Mobile searches take into account a number of different criteria to determine a site’s ranking, which can include overall site performance, usability, download speed and screen rendering, among other things. But the extra work is worth it, because not only are mobile users searching more and more, but they’re also buying more frequently from their devices.

When it comes to preparing your business for mobile search, there are a number of ways that you can differentiate your SEO practices to be ready for tech-savvy, mobile-ready consumers that can help you vastly improve your business’s performance on the mobile Web.

Design for All Devices

A website that is appropriately optimized for mobile devices of all shapes, sizes and operating systems will have a much better chance of ranking higher in the mobile SERPs, particularly when compared to a site that has just been reformatted to fit a smaller screen. This is because transcoding a pre-existing Web page strips it of some key content and leads to incomplete pages and, thus, decreased usability. All of this is detrimental to a high page ranking.

Plus, the type of mobile device that a user is searching on also plays a role in determining site ranking, as different mobile browsers render pages in different ways that can affect usability. As a result, brands with device agnostic mobile strategies that work with a number of different mobile operating systems will consistently rank higher for the vast majority of mobile users.

Localize

If you already have some sort of local presence online, you should definitely be nurturing that as part of your mobile SEO initiatives, because often, many mobile searchers are actually looking for specific information about local businesses. In fact, according to a Google survey, 76 percent of mobile consumers use their devices to search for a business’s location or operating hours.

In other words, part of having good mobile SEO is also having good local search optimization in place, especially if you’re just a local business or a retailer with various brick-and-mortar locations. For a quick guide on how to get started, check out our 3 Key Steps to Optimize for Local Search.

Be Ready for Email

Approximately 41 percent of all emails that marketers send out are opened on mobile devices, which means that companies should be incorporating multiple incoming links into their digital newsletters that will send recipients to their websites. These links will offer a fully integrated experience that gives brands a chance to establish a more connected presence across the mobile Web. But more importantly, these traffic driving tools, along with social media, allow consumers to find and click on links instantly.

All of that traffic, especially via outside links, is going to look good for your mobile website and can play a big role in helping to improve your mobile SEO efforts. However, links that aren’t tested or maintained will obviously end up leading to a loss of traffic from redirects to your mobile site, so make sure you put working links in your email newsletters, in order to fully reap the benefits of all of that traffic.

It make take some time and testing to get it right, but readjusting your SEO practices and reimagining your website to consider mobile search engines may be the next step to helping your brand conquer the mobile Web.

SEO for China from GinzaMetrics

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:35:00 GMT

Enterprsise SEO and content marketing platform GinzaMetrics is going global, extending support to Chinese search engines Baidu and Sogou.

Baidu, Sogou and Google are now the default search engines for users selecting China as their website’s target country. GinzaMetrics users are now able to track organic search, social, and content for their websites in any country, with the platform suggesting relevant search engines. By providing companies access to organic search, social, and content marketing information from Baidu and Sogou, GinzaMetrics users can report on and gather recommendations for enhancing their global search strategies. Users can even tap into the monitoring features to observe the search and content performance of their competitors to understand the types of keywords and content that are trending for others in their industry.

GinzaMetrics CEO, Ray Grieselhuber, cites support for Baidu and Sogou as, “A result of growing e-commerce and web-based businesses in China, as well as the globalization of companies that need to be relevant in each of their markets.”

Big List of Link Building No-Nos

Michael Garrity — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 19:30:00 GMT

Link building is one of the most basic methods that Web professionals use to grow their businesses online. It’s a pretty great system because there are so many different ways to build links on the Internet, but it’s also really difficult because there are so many ways to build links, meaning there are a lot of ways to screw it up.

So, while getting links is an essential task for website owners, they should also make sure that they’re doing it the right way. Otherwise, their brand can be seriously (and in drastic cases, even irreparably) damaged. But with so many options for link building, how do you know what to do and what not to do? That’s easy! Just check out this Website Magazine guide to link building no-nos.

Irrelevant or Duplicate Content
If you’re trying to garner links from websites, the first thing you should do is make sure you’re worth linking to! That means producing original and valuable content that is going to have some relevance to the people visiting the pages you want links from. Also, avoid running duplicate content (either content previously published on your site, or that you’ve written and published elsewhere) and writing guest blog posts for irrelevant sites. This will make your site feel authoritative and be more attractive to high-quality links.

Don’t Spam or Leave Irrelevant Comments
Look, nobody on the Web likes a spammer, so don’t be that guy (or gal). It’s fair game for you to want to visit websites or forums that are relevant to your audience or niche and spread the word about your great site in hopes of building a few links, but that doesn’t mean you should just drop in context-less comments or replies that don’t really help progress any discussions or provide value to other readers, all in hopes that they’ll pay attention to you. Instead, take part in ongoing discussions to build your presence as an authority, and only add references or links to your site when it will add value to other visitors. And if you’re on a forum, you can even include a link to your site in your signature.

Be Social – Not Pushy
Social media marketing is basically a necessity on the Web these days; you’re just not going to get anywhere without it. However, just having a profile on Facebook, Twitter, etc. is not enough – you also have to be social and engage with your fans/followers and other big names in your niche. Be friendly and open, and under no circumstances should you simply and blatantly engage in self-promotion, or spam the walls (and news feeds) of your fans with promotional links.

Don’t Buy Crappy Links
The ultimate goal for people looking to build links is to find those that are high-quality and relevant to your site, so not only is it a waste for you to try to buy links from low-quality sources, it’ll also get you in trouble with Google, which keeps a cautious eye on low quality link sites that engage in a nefarious practice called “link farming.” When it comes to getting quality links, your site and content should be all you need. And while you’re at it, don’t bother with “trading” links with low quality sites just to have them. You’re better than that…

Slow Down on Submitting to Directories
Directories, either paid or free, are great because they can seem like they're these big fields where links grow just for you, but don’t be tempted to just submit your site to a bunch of directories the week it goes live. Remember, good links come naturally and are built up over time. Plus, search engines can totally tell when you’ve just acquired a lot of links by going directory crazy, and that’s going to do more harm than good for your site in the immediate future.

Don’t Over-Link to Your Own Site
If you’re a hard-working content marketer, chances are you’re producing articles and blog posts pretty regularly, including for other websites or blogs that you don’t run. Naturally, you may want to drop a link to your site once, maybe twice, in said article, if there’s a natural and not-totally-obvious way to do it (most authors save this for their bio section attached to the article). Be careful not to “over-link” to your site in these articles, though. Remember, you’re supposed to be offering relevant and valuable information to your readers, not promoting your website, so never drop in more than one link to your site. Besides, Google is open about the fact that it only reads the first link anyway, so more than one link is not only annoying, but also useless.

Link to Various Pages on Your Site
One of the biggest mistakes that people make when linking to their websites is to link only to their home pages. This is a bad idea, because (A) it makes users have to dig to find certain information, so just link to the pages you want them to see, and (B) it gives your site a bad deep link ratio and negatively affects how well your deeper “child” pages will rank on the search engines. But also, if your site has a canonical issue that gives you a “/index.html” URL in addition to your domain URL, make sure that when you DO link to your home page, it doesn’t send users to this index page (or any other home page extensions).

Change Up the Anchor Text
When you’re targeting a specific term that you want associated with your website, you may think it’s a good idea to use the same anchor text in your links over and over again. It’s not. In fact, this kind of narrow targeting will actually hurt you on the search engines. Instead, try to vary the anchor text you use to include OTHER relevant or related terms, or terms specific to the page you’re linking to. This will help your site rank for more terms, obviously. Plus, it would be helpful to include your company or website name in a percentage of your links, as well.