Friday 24 February 2012

How to Optimize a Company YouTube Channel


Many brands are finally realising the power of video as a traffic and sales generator, producing video content that both advertises their products/services and informs their customers. YouTube is a natural home for this video content, as it’s not only the 2nd largest search engine in many countries (after Google) but also free and easy to use.
The downside of YouTube’s massive reach is that there are 60 hours of new video uploaded to YouTube every minute, so it’s very easy to get lost in the noise. In order to ensure that your content is amongst the 4 billion videos streamed each day, companies should do everything they can to optimize their corporate presence on the platform. Here are some of the first steps to consider…

Video Content

When producing content for YouTube, you may find (depending on the demographic and viewing device) that most people will prefer to watch short form video content, so aim for videos to be between 3-5 minutes long. If you have a video that is 10+ minutes long, consider splitting it into multiple segments and give each segment a unique title and brief introduction.
If you have a large archive of video content, do not upload it all at once. Instead, drip feed YouTube with a couple of videos each day. This frequency of uploading has been found to really grow channels quickly.
Within any made for YouTube content, Ayima recommends having the presenter/narrator prompt the viewer to Subscribe to the channel, Like the video or Leave a Comment. If you can start to encourage the audience to interact with the YouTube Channel more, your brand will naturally build strong quality score signals.

Uploading

Even if your company has many brands and products, Ayima recommends uploading all of the video content into a single branded YouTube channel. YouTube channels are like domain names in Google’s web ranking algorithms, consolidating domains/channels to a single location boosts authority and rankings across the board. If you already have multiple channels, it may be worth migrating the videos into a single destination.
Make sure that every video has a unique title, that describes the video and includes the keywords you would use if searching for the video.
e.g. “ACME Widgets Video” could become “How to use ACME widgets” or “ACME Widget in-depth review”.
Don’t include your brand name in the title of each video as a branding exercise – if the video isn’t specifically about your company (e.g. History, Recruitment, News etc), having the company name in the title is merely diluting the relevancy of your video for related searches.
When tagging up a video on YouTube, try to keep the number of tags in the 5-10 terms range. Exclude stop words such as “the” and make sure that you really focus on words that give context to what the video is about. Examples of good tags include:
- Place names
- Peoples names
- Brand, product or model names
Tagging helps YouTube form the Related Videos suggestions, so if you tag videos correctly you can find that your brand’s videos now show up at the end of other popular videos in your niche. It’s worth researching what tags similar popular videos have used – as with the title – avoid dilution of relevancy by only using tags that are exact matches.
A lot of the top YouTube channel owners have built their large audience base by treating YouTube as a social network, it’s not just about having great content. Interact with your company’s YouTube audience as you would a Facebook fan or Twitter follower, user engagement should dramatically improve.

Ranking Videos on YouTube / within Google

YouTube videos rank very well within Google’s universal, aka “blended”, search results – often pushing down organic listings that have significant authority and many inbound links. For that reason alone, hosting your videos on the YouTube domain which has such a high authority within Google, has a clear advantage. But like other content, if you want to increase the chances of a video appearing within the organic search results, you need to look at building links to the video within YouTube just as you would a key page on your corporate site. One way of doing this is to conduct a blogger outreach program where you contact relevant blogs and offer them the video to embed on their website. Within the YouTube “Embed” code (linked to under each video) you can also append a link to the root of your channel or to the video itself.
When a video is embedded on a page – the content of that page provides Google with further context of the type of searches that the video should rank for. So embed the videos on your main site where possible.
With the relevancy of the video taken into account, the following factors will help to increase the rankings of each video within YouTube:
- Number of channel subscribers
- Frequency of new video uploads to the Channel
- Ratio of thumbs up / thumbs down for each video
- Video engagement (ratio of thumbs up/down and comments)
Once the channel is set-up and optimized content is starting to drip in, your company should use other social networks to promote the channel and push people to each new video. This means promotion of the channel to your newsletter, previous customers, active clients and followers/fans on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

Five key actions to take away from this…

1. Optimize video titles as you would with webpage titles
2. Increase the uploading frequency of fresh new content (but don’t upload all at once)
3. Embed videos on relevant websites and reach out to bloggers in your space
4. Leverage existing social networks to grow your YouTube Subscriber count
5. Treat YouTube Subscribers as you would Facebook Fans
You can of course buy thumbs up on YouTube in a similar way to buying links, to manipulate YouTube’s ranking factors. It’s a very risky practice unless you know what you are doing and to start with, you’re much better off concentrating on producing more video content and growing the channel organically.

Friday 3 February 2012

Is PageRank Important?

Just Enough Knowledge to be Dangerous

One of the bigger problems with learning in the field of SEO is that there are a lot of people who have a nugget of information. And they spread it far and wide without the proper context needed to evaluate the potential risks and rewards of any given strategy. So new SEOs end up thinking topic x is the most important, then topic y, then topic z. And then someone debunks one of those. Many false facts are taken as truths when the people with a nugget of information (that they found from some source) spread it as fact.

Accurate Answers Need Context

As the structure of the web changes and search engine relevancy algorithms change then so must the field of SEO. This means that the right answer to questions can change frequently, and information from many years ago may not be correct. Does PageRank matter? When I first got in SEO it was crucially important, but over the years other pieces of the relevancy algorithms (like domain age, domain name, domain trust, domain extension, link anchor text, searcher location, search query chains, word relationships, search personalization, other user data, result re-ranking based on local inter-connectivity, input from 10,000+ remote quality raters, and even a wide array of penalties & filters) have been layered over the top of the core relevancy algorithm.

If that sounds like a lot, it is because it is!

Yes, PageRank is important to driving indexing, but for rankings it is nowhere near as important as it once was. SEO has become a much more refined art. In an October 2009 interview, Google's Amit Singal stated:

No one should feel, if I dismantle the current search system, someone will get upset. That’s the wrong environment. When I came, I dismantled [Google cofounders] Larry and Sergey’s whole ranking system. That was the whole idea. I just said, That’s how I think it should be done, and Sergey said, Great!

Great SEO Service is Interactive

Search keeps innovating - as it must. Each layer of innovation creates new challenges and new opportunities.

Not only does SEO strategy change over time, but it also varies from site to site. A large corporate site has a different set of strengths and weaknesses than a small local business website. The best SEO advice must incorporate all of the following
  • where you are
  • where you want to be
  • the resources you have to bridge the gap between the above 2 (domain names, brand, social relations, public relations, capital, etc.)
  • what the competition is doing
  • your strengths and weaknesses relative to your market

That is why having an interactive SEO Community is so important. It allows us to look for competitive strengths and weaknesses, and offer useful tips that fit your market, your website, and your business.

Even Search Engineers Don't Know All the Search Algorithms

The algorithms are so complex that sometimes even leading search engineers working for Google are uncertain of what is going on. Search engineers can't know every bit of code because Google has made over 450 algorithm changes in a single year.

When I first wrote about a new algorithmic anomaly that I (and others) saw, I got flamed with some pretty nasty words on public SEO sites...a few of which are highlighted below:

SEO Company.

The above people were:

  • confident
  • rude
  • wrong

And that is part of the reason I stopped sharing as much research publicly. Sharing publicly meant...

  • spending long hours of research and writing (for free)
  • creating more competition for myself (from the people who listen to my tips and advice)
  • watching my brand get dragged through the mud by people who didn't have the experience or capacity needed to understand and evaluate what I was writing about (but who had enough time to hang out in a free forum and blast me).

Whereas if we share that sort of information in our exclusive member forums we...

  • help our customers
  • get to share information and learn from each other's experiences
  • don't get blasted by the trolls hanging out on the public forums

Google's Matt Cutts Confirmed I Was Right

In early 2008 Google's Matt Cutts (one of the top 4 search engineers working at Google) wrote about the above issue that he did not know existed (even AFTER he was alerted to it).

Matt Cutts on Position 6 Issue.

But take notice that Matt would not confirm the issue until he claimed it had been corrected. So if you wanted to research that issue to better learn the relevancy algorithms it was already gone.

SEO professionals either captured the opportunity early or missed it. And, if they waited for the official word from Google, they missed it.

Algorithmic anomalies & new penalties are often written off by the industry & then months or years later the truth is revealed.

Back to PageRank

So PageRank...is it important? Yes, primarily for

  • determining the original source of content when duplicates of a page exist
  • selecting the initial set of results (before re-ranking them based on other factors)
  • establishing the crawl priority and crawl depth of a site

But when determining which site ranks better than the next, link diversity is typically far more important than raw PageRank. And even though PageRank is supposed to be query independent, Google warps their view of the web graph where necessary to improve relevancy, like when localizing search results:

Q: Anything you’ve focused on more recently than freshness?

A: Localization. We were not local enough in multiple countries, especially in countries where there are multiple languages or in countries whose language is the same as the majority country.

So in Austria, where they speak German, they were getting many more German results because the German Web is bigger, the German linkage is bigger. Or in the U.K., they were getting American results, or in India or New Zealand. So we built a team around it and we have made great strides in localization. And we have had a lot of success internationally.

The above quote shows how they look at far more than PageRank and links when trying to determine relevancy.

3 Common SEO Approaches

There are 3 basic ways to approach search engine optimization

  • a mechanical strategy, where you try to outsmart the search engines and stay ahead of their relevancy algorithms
  • a marketing-based approach, where you try to meet ranking criteria by creating the types of content that other people value and making sure you push market it aggressively
  • a hybrid approach, where you take the easy mechanical wins and study general algorithmic shifts...but are primarily driving your decisions based on fundamental marketing principals

Comparing the 3 Strategies

For most people the first approach is simply too complex, risky, and uncertain to be worth the effort. Not only do the sites get burned to the ground, but it happens over and over again, so it is quite hard to build momentum and a real business that keeps growing. In fact, most of the top "black hat" SEOs have "white hat" sites that help provide stable income in case anything happens to their riskier sites. Some people are great at coming up with clever hacks, but most people would be better off focusing on building their business using more traditional means.

If search engineers have access to the source code and still don't know everything then how can people outside the company know everything? They can't. Which is why we take a hybrid approach to SEO.

The approach we teach is the hybrid approach - a marketing-based strategy with some easy mechanical wins mixed in. Our customers take some of these easy wins to help differentiate their strategy from uninformed competitors, and then use marketing principals to build off of early success.

The Paradox of SEO

In using a marketing based approach you build up many signals of trust and many rankings as a side effect of doing traditional marketing. If people are talking about you and like your products then you are probably going to get some free high-quality links. And this leads us to the paradox of SEO: "the less reliant your site is on Google the more Google will want to rely on your site."

If you want good information to find out what is working and what is not, you can use our site searchto find answers to most common SEO questions, and know you are getting answers from a trust-worthy source. The information we give away is of higher value than what most people sell.

Thursday 19 January 2012

10 Elements of a Perfectly Optimized Page

One area that search engines have made a number of significant advancements in recent years is in how they evaluate content on a website. So what does a perfectly optimized page look like in 2012? Let’s look at 10 elements.

Bearnaise Sauce Optimized Page

1. Title tags are still important, but it’s not a good idea to over-optimize them.

2. Descriptions still don’t appear to add much ranking value, but can help encourage clicks.

3. Header tags still need to be relevant.

4. URL still ideally mentions the keywords.

5. Content is now about semantically relevant supporting keywords, not multiple mentions of the keywords. The example chosen is a recipe, because in order to make béarnaise sauce there are specific ingredients that are 100 percent relevant to the eventual outcome. One way of checking what keywords Google might consider as relevant is to do a ‘~keyword’ (or tilde) search. Other ways, let’s be honest, involve nothing more than common sense and knowing your subject.

6. Video and other ‘rich’ content can be useful on a page to increase engagement levels, reduce bounce rates and also to appear alongside results as illustrated.

apple-ipad-review-serp

7. Internal links need to follow the "reasonable surfer" patent. It makes sense in the "perfectly optimized page" example above to link to peppercorn sauce as an alternative to béarnaise.

8. Facebook/Twitter/other login comments are a way of sharing the content on other platforms. The direct SEO benefit may be debatable, but it never hurts to get your content in front of a large amount of people. With Google Search Plus Your World, it could be that adding a Google+ login is more important than anything else.

9. User reviews add regular content to the page, which can also be coded to include microformatting instructions and add extra elements to your listings in search engine result pages (SERPs).

10. Newsfeeds only share content that already exists elsewhere, but they contribute to an overall impression of the page changing on a regular basis.

It’s worth noting that the “perfectly optimized page” above won’t be perfect for all verticals, or for all brands – not everyone has the ability to add customer reviews to their product pages (e.g., insurance comparison sites).

Although there's no one-size-fits-all solution, hopefully the above list will give you some guidance on how to perfect your on-page SEO.

Tuesday 10 January 2012

5 Things Bloggers Should Not Do In The First Month Of Blogging

As a new blogger we are excited about making money online or setting up business that we forget a lot of important things that is required. Here are 5 Things Bloggers Should Not Do during the first month of blogging at least.

Bloggers Should Not Expect Overnight Results

After just weeks into blogging, you find many bloggers quitting their blogs. One of the main reason being the determination and the lack of understanding of how the system works. Its important for you as a new blogger not to expect over night results. Bloggers are frustrated and vexed that their blog is not making any money at all and there are hardly 10 to 20 visitors daily. This is normal, the thing you need to understand is that it takes time for people to know of your blog and your blog to have some authority in the blogosphere. Google knowing bloggers quit often, only send traffic to blogs or websites that are over 3 months older.

Bloggers Should Not Not Ignore Your Readers

Another important aspect that you as a blogger should not ignore is your reader. Often bloggers are found ignoring comments and arguments in the comments section, neglecting to respond to emails and more. This results in very bad brand reputation and those readers would never visit your blog again. Remember to answer your readers comments and respond to emails on time or at least acknowledge them on time.

Bloggers Should Not Scrape Content Off Another Blog

This is been increasing off late, that blogger who are new and not finding ideas to write decide to copy and paste entire posts from other blogs. This is a very bad idea, and you can get banned from Google, or if the content is copyright, then you might even receive a notice from the copyright owner. Research for ideas and write your own content. With tools like copyscape its becoming much easier to find duplicate content on the web.

Bloggers Should Not Feel Lazy To Write Regularly

This is one of the most important aspect to why a blogger or a blog never sees the light of success. Bloggers become lazy to write regularly and lack in consistency. This results in blog being randomly updated with no specific focus. What if your blog was a newspaper delivering content to people all over the world, do you think it would be good to stop writing and stop providing information?

Bloggers Should Not Ignore SEO

SEO one of the most important aspect of any blog or website after content creation. Its not only important to write for your reader, but its also important that you do everything that you can so that search engines can read your content and rank them well. By taking the required SEO efforts you improve the chance of driving visitor from search engines like Google and sure to see the light of success.

All About Anchor Text - Whiteboard Friday


Welcome to our first Whiteboard Friday of the new year. It's 2012 and we're going to kick it off by examining the intricacies that revolve around anchor text. Although, this may seem like a very basic topic, we are going to cover some lesser known aspects of anchor text that is sure to satisfy even our more advanced SEOs. Enjoy and don't forget to leave your comments below!
EmbedVideo Stats


Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Happy New Year. This is the first Whiteboard Friday of 2012, and today we're talking about anchor text, which could seem like a basic topic. But, in fact, there are a lot of intricacies that we should cover. Let's get right to them.

What I have drawn here is a web page, and it says, "I just found this great website on Portuguese cooks. You should check it out." Now, this, this text in blue with the underline, that links somewhere, and that link points to another page. Let's say it's a page over here, a very nice page on Portuguese cooks. It has some pictures on it. I don't know what it's got.

What it's saying to the engines is not only eye this page and this website, I'm voting for this other page over here, and I want to pass over some PageRank and link juice. I want to pass over trust. I want to pass over the domain diversity, whatever the signals, the keyword agnostics signals are, but I also want to say that I particularly like this web page about Portuguese cooks. That's what I think you, search engine, should interpret and take away from it.

Of course, this anchor text with the keyword embedded in it becomes a very strong signal to search engines, and as we all know, this is one of the strongest signals that Google and Bing interpret, Bing maybe even stronger than Google. Because of this, lots of people go down a path of trying to acquire links that say the precise keyword that they want.

Of course, this is a challenge because most natural links on the Web don't generally do this. They will say things like your brand name. They might say something about your site. They might use your personal name, if they're linking to a blog or something. But it's rare, it's uncommon that they might say "Audi 87 engine parts for sale" or "best deals on holiday gifts." These types of anchor texts, the things that people search for, longer phrases, in particular, are very hard to get as natural links, and this is one of the biggest reasons that gray and black hat SEO exist because manipulating the search engines by acquiring lots of links that have these keyword matches pointing to your page can, in fact, do a great job of ranking you up, at least temporarily until the engines catch up and do something bad to you or to the people linking to you.

What I want to cover is some intricacies around this, some details that you may or may not know about anchor text, and those include: Number one, multiple anchors from the same page "do not" provide more value. What I mean by this is if this page said I just found this great website on Portuguese cooks, you should check it out and a bunch of other text, and then it said Portuguese cooks again and linked over to this page, not helpful. It does not add additional value. There is no reason that you should be going, "Oh man, I wish I could get four anchor text match links from this web page." No, that's not going to help you.

Multiple web pages will help you, but if they're from the same domain, that's not nearly as valuable as if they're from different domains. That leads us to the next thing, diversity of anchor text, diversity of the source. The root domain source of the anchor text links provides the strongest benefit, meaning if you can get lots and lots of websites, not just individual web pages but different unique web domains, linking to you saying "Portuguese cooks," chances are good this web page will do very well.

Number three, the fluctuating anchor text. This is something that people talk about all the time. They don't just talk about diversity of the link location across different domains, but they talk about diversity of anchor text itself, meaning, "Oh, I should have one that says Portuguese cooks and one that says Portuguese cooking and one that says cooks from Portugal. I'm going to vary up the anchor text a lot."

I'm a little skeptical about this, not because it's not potentially useful, and it should be a natural thing if you're going out and doing white hat types of link building and inbound marketing. But because the primary reason I think most SEOs do this is so as to not trigger pattern matching problems in the engines, meaning if every website that's linking to me says Portuguese cooks, that's suspicious, highly suspicious. That suspiciousness is the feature that people are trying to prevent.

So, I'm not so sure whether this fluctuation is all that important unless you're doing manipulative types of link building, in which case SEOmoz is not all that helpful for you. So, you're probably not watching this video.

Number four, the first anchor text in the HTML of a page is what Google counts, Bing as well. This was discovered on SEOmoz a couple of years ago. We ran some tests about it. We published the results. There was a lot of skepticism. I think Debra Mastaler from Alliance-Link wrote about it and said, "Hey, Matt Cutts, would you please confirm this?" And he did. He came out and said, "Yeah, that's how we interpret it".

So, basically, here's what's going on. If you see a web page and it says this website is awesome, it features highlights of great Portuguese cooks, now look, these two links are both pointing to the same page. I don't know why my handwriting is so terrible in 2012. I hope that repairs itself soon. That means not that the website is going to get credit for the anchor text website and the anchor text Portuguese cooks, but rather they are going to consider the anchor text website and ignore Portuguese cooks.

It's very frustrating, and something that you should think about when you're doing internal linking and you say, "Oh, yeah, we should optimize this link." If it's already in your menu, if it's already at the top of the page somewhere in a side bar and that's higher up in the HTML code, then that is what the engine is going to count. So, do be aware of that and same goes for anything that you're earning externally. If you've got the optimized anchor text for your website in the footer of the blog post where it talks about the author, Rand Fishkin is the CEO of SEOmoz, an SEO tools company, but I've already link to SEOmoz's home page somewhere in the blog post above, that "SEO tools company," that's not going to help anything. That's going to be discounted by the engines.

Number five, internal anchor text, meaning anchor text that comes from your own site, your own pages, it does help. It helps a tiny bit. You can see a little bit of benefit from that. I wouldn't focus on it too much because tiny is a small amount. That's probably the most obvious statement I've ever made on Whiteboard Friday. But nevertheless, tiny, small amount, therefore don't focus too much energy on this. Link naturally, internally. Link in such a way that people think your site is good, and, yeah, if you can work in your anchor text, great.

External anchor text is where it really helps, meaning websites that are not your own linking to you. That's where you really get value from anchor text, and you do need to worry about this a little bit. There should be some manual efforts, some efforts, whether that's guest posting and blogging, whether that's sponsoring an event, whether that's getting your biography featured or something like that, getting a badge embedded somewhere or a graphic embedded somewhere that links back to you in a certain way, you do need that anchor text link match. So, working on at least a little of that external anchor text is definitely worthwhile.

Number six, if a link uses an image, like this, so check out this awesome site on Portuguese cooks, and then here's a little screen shot of the Portuguese cooks website, and this is linking over. I tried to illustrate that in blue. This does not have any anchor text. It's an image. So what could the anchor text possibly be?

The answer is they use the Alt attribute. The engines use the Alt attribute that becomes the anchor text usually, not always. If there is no Alt attribute, sometimes they'll use something like the surrounding text, and you can sort of see and feel that association. Sometimes, they'll use page titles. Sometimes, they won't use anything, but they'll have weaker signals from those other areas of the page, that kind of thing.

If you are embedding images and you're linking back to yourself or you're getting links from somewhere or you're linking out to someone, you want to help them out, use good Alt attributes that describe the page that you're linking to. This is a great best practice just in general for screen readers and usability reasons. It's also good for search engines.

Then finally, number seven, no surprise, surrounding text can matter as well. Just as in this example where we said, "Hey, Portuguese cooks is mentioned right before the image," the engines may be using surrounding text of an anchor, particularly where the anchor itself doesn't have much value or context.

If something says, "Click here, you'll find some great information about Portuguese cooks," the engines might sort of glance around the page and look at the sentence, parse the paragraph, try and understand, "Hey, what do you think they're talking about here? What seems relevant?" This is one of the reasons why you can see that people who have earned not necessarily great anchor text can rank very well for keywords because it's often talked about. That topic is talked about when their website is talked about, and it becomes a brand association thing. It becomes a contextual association thing. This is a helpful thing to think about if you are earning links and you can't control the anchor text. Maybe, at least, you can get them to mention what you do somewhere near the link.

All right, everyone. I hope this edition of Whiteboard Friday has been helpful. I look forward to discussing more details about anchor text in the comments and hope to see you again all next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

How Google+ Uses SEO to Steal Search from Facebook and Twitter


  Google's Superior SEO Strategy

Notice anything odd about your Google+ profile? Does it rank incredibly well in Google’s search results for your own name?
Colleagues note that their G+ profile now outranks other online identities that they’ve worked for years on. My own Google+ profile, just 5 months old, ranks #2 for my name. It now ranks higher than both my Twitter and Facebook profiles, even though I use those services far more often.
Profiles aren’t the only thing ranking. Individual Google+ posts frequently appear in search results as well.
Google+ Domination
Ranking for people’s names is one of the Holy Grails of search, like Amazon ranking for every book in print. With 7 billion people in the world, ranking on the first page for even a small portion of these is lucrative territory.
As search and social focus more on the individual, the war over names has begun.
How has Google won so much real estate on their own search pages in such a short period of time? Do they cheat? No, not really - more on this later. Google wins by employing really smart Search Engine Optimization techniques – the same SEO practices available to any online business.
For Facebook especially, this is a sensitive issue. Facebook actively prevents Google from crawling most of its content, allowing big G to access “Fan” pages, but limiting information from regular profiles. Now that Google+ has entered the social game, this policy puts Facebook results at risk of dropping in rankings and losing search real estate.
I often work with websites and startups wanting to build SEO features into their platform. If I were to build a social media service for SEO domination from scratch, I would build it exactly like Google+.
Here's the takeaway: Use SEO to your competitive advantage, no matter your niche.

1. Incentivize Inbound Links

Not long ago, Google started displaying author photos in its search results. In order to display a photo, Google asks authors to add links from their webpages to their Google+ profile. This creates potentially millions of high quality links from the world’s most influential online publishers, all pointing to multiple Google+ profiles.
Google+ Linking
Twitter and Facebook both benefit from similar links, but never before has a social media service offered such an incentive.
Google's SEO Tactic: Require Authors to Link to their Google+ Profile

2. Internal Linking

One thing noted about Google+ when it was released was just how easy it was to be in lots of circles, or add lots of people to your own. People who struggled on Twitter for years to build up 1000 followers, suddenly found themselves in 2000 or 3000 Google+ circles, seemingly overnight.
Circle Count
Google’s strategy to connect everyone on the planet also makes for good internal linking. Following more than 1000 people may not create a practical social experience, but it creates a great SEO opportunity. The more your content is shared in other people’s streams and profiles, then the more your content is crawled, indexed, and deemed important by search engines.
Google's SEO Tactic: Encourage Large Circles Counts

3. Lots of Indexable Content

My public Google+ profile contains a wealth of information, all visible to search engines, including:
  • Biographical Information
  • Full Text of Public Posts
  • Photos
  • Links to people who have added me to their circles
  • Everything I have ever +1’d
Compare that to my Twitter account – limited to 160 characters of biographical information, or my Facebook profile, which reads like an auto-generated pamphlet.
Consider how a search engine sees these pages. Take a look at the source code of any Google+ profile or use a tool SEO-browser (a search robot simulator) to see how many words appear on each profile.
  • Facebook – 275 Words

  • Twitter – 491 Words

  • Google+ – 2621 Words

Google structures content to provide a wealth of information for search engines, to index and serve in search results.
Google's SEO Tactic: Search Engine Friendly Profiles

4. On-Page Optimization

Google+ makes it easy to share posts from others – a feature much like retweeting on Twitter or reblogging on Tumblr. These Google+ posts frequently show up in search results as their own entries.
As the title tag is one of the most important aspects of on-page optimization, Google wisely choose longer, more descriptive title tags. Compare these to the shorter title tags offered by Facebook and Twitter, which often run no longer than three unique words.
Here’s the title tag to 3 different posts, all by Rand Fishkin. Each of these posts is indexed by Google.
  • Facebook – Yesterday, I…
  • Twitter – Twitter / @randfish: Running test of Google+’s …
  • Google+ – Rand Fishkin – Google+ – Shocking how many of the folks featured in this post form…
Which do you think ranks better for a query with “Rand Fishkin” in the search?
Rand Fishkin
Google's SEO Tactic: Descriptive Title Tags

5. User Generated Content

Every post I’ve ever written on Google+ has been public. As a result, every post has been crawled and indexed by Google search. The privacy settings on the profiles are simple, intuitive and encourage openness.
The big green button screams, “Pick me! Pick me!”
Share Google+
Most Twitter posts are public by default, although unless a tweet becomes famous the 140 character limit prevents most tweets from reaching the definition of “rich” content. Facebook, in contrast, only shares posts from fan pages with Google, and not posts from regular profiles.
Google's SEO Tactic: Encourage Public Sharing

6. Show Google+ Author Profiles in Search Results

The first 5 items on this list represent SEO tactics that anyone can use, but in a way #6 belongs to Google alone. By linking to Google+ profiles in search results, they create an advantage that no other social media service can duplicate.
Is Google “cheating” by favoring it’s own property? Some say yes, but on the other hand, is there a more relevant result? To me, it makes more sense to connect my author profile with the website that actually hosts the content, such as my profile on SEOmoz.
Rich Google Snippets
This demonstrates the power of rich snippets. Since Google introduced author photos in search results, webmasters have scrambled to get their mug included – the idea being that rich snippets of all kinds increase click-through rates. The question is, are we increasing the CTR of our own website, or Google+?
Google's SEO Tactic: Creative Rich Snippets

What Can You Do?

Except for #6 above, most of these techniques are available to any online business. Google has found a way to create large amounts of search engine friendly content, and do it at scale.
The lack of diversity this creates in Google's search results is troubling to some. Google risks turning into McGoogle, where every result and every page looks the same. With any luck, more companies will adopt strong SEO strategies to raise themselves in search.
Now that the adoption of Google+ has hit 62 million users and growing, expect to see far more Google+ in your search results soon.

Thursday 29 December 2011

Google Panda Update: Say Goodbye to Low-Quality Link Building

A while back, I wrote about how to get the best high volume links. Fast forward eight months and Google has made two major changes to its algorithm -- first to target spammy/scraper sites, followed by the larger Panda update that targeted "low quality" sites. Plus, Google penalized JCPenney, Forbes, and Overstock.com for "shady" linking practices.

What's it all mean for link builders? Well, it's time we say goodbye to low quality link building altogether.

'But The Competitors Are Doing It' Isn't an Excuse

This may be tough for some link builders to digest, especially if you're coming from a research standpoint and you see that competitors for a particular keyword are dominating because of their thousands upon thousands of pure spam links.

But here are two things you must consider about finding low quality, high volume links in your analysis:

  1. Maybe it isn't the links that got the competitor where they are today. Maybe they are a big enough brand with a good enough reputation to be where they are for that particular keyword.
  2. If the above doesn't apply, then maybe it's just a matter of time before Google cracks down even further, giving no weight to those spammy backlinks.

Because, let's face it. You don't want to be the SEO company behind the next Overstock or JCPenney link building gone wrong story!

How to Determine a Valuable Backlink Opportunity

How can you determine whether a site you're trying to gain a link from is valuable? Here are some "warning" signs as to what Google may have or eventually deem as a low-quality site.

  • Lots of ads. If the site is covered with five blocks of AdSense, Kontera text links, or other advertising chunks, you might want to steer away from them.
  • Lack of quality content. If you can get your article approved immediately, chances are this isn't the right article network for your needs. If the article network is approving spun or poorly written content, it will be hard for the algorithm to see your "diamond in the rough." Of course, when a site like Suite101.com, which has one hell of an editorial process, gets dinged, then extreme moderation may not necessarily be a sign of a safe site either (in their case, ads were the more likely issue).
  • Lots of content, low traffic. A blog with a Google PageRank of 6 probably looks like a great place to spam a comment. But if that blog doesn't have good authority in terms of traffic and social sharing, then it may be put on the list of sites to be de-valued in the future. PageRank didn't save some of the sites in the Panda update, considering there are several sites with PageRank 7 and above (including a PR 9).
  • Lack of moderation. Kind of goes with the above, except in this case I mean blog comments and directories. If you see a ton of spammy links on a page, you don't want yours to go next to it. Unless you consider it a spammy link, and then more power to you to join the rest of them.

What Should You Be Doing

Where should you focus your energy? Content, of course!

Nine in 10 organizations use blogs, whitepapers, webinars, infographics, and other high quality content to leverage for link building and to attract natural, organic links. Not only can use your content to build links, but you can use it to build leads as well by proving the business knows their stuff when it comes to their industry.

Have You Changed Your Link Building Strategy?

With the recent news, penalties, and algorithm changes, have you begun to change your link building strategies? Please share your thoughts in the comments!