By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, 18 January 2012

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 optimised page look like in 2012? Let’s look at 10 elements.

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By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch,  October 26th, 2011

I am not usually one for a conspiracy theory, unless it’s contained within a decent yarn like the Da Vinci code… but over the last year in particular, I am becoming increasingly convinced that Google wants rid of natural search results – to the point where I would really like them to make a statement of some kind and put people out of their misery.

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By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, Mar 16 2011

Depending on who you speak to, search engine optimization (SEO) is either largely influenced or not at all influenced by social media. I’m sure everyone has their own opinions, case studies, and sites that show greater or lesser correlations between their social media engagement levels and their natural search results.

If you were to carry out an investigation into whether social media was a big influencing factor, which metrics would you want to monitor in order to base your insights on more empirical data?

I’ve put together a list of 13 ranking factors below. Feel free to use these and any others you can get your grubby SEO mitts on!

1. Number of Followers (Twitter)

You’ll need your own corporate Twitter feed, which brings its own problems around brand protection and also the potential for dealing with customer service enquiries, but the more followers you have, the more authoritative your Twitter persona and the more value will be associated with your URL (assuming you have remembered to link to it).

2. Quality of Followers (Twitter)

The best followers are the ones with their own communities of followers. The more high value people who follow you, and retweet your stuff, the better.

3. Relevance of Followers (Twitter)

It’s one thing getting followed and retweeted by Stephen Fry with over a million followers, but it’s also important to get the same response from accounts that are more specific to your industry. Someone with “fashion” in their description who retweets your “20 percent off the new spring collection” offer is equally valuable.

4. Number of Retweets (Twitter)

Most likely as a ratio of tweets to retweets — the more your content is reproduced by others the more authoritative it is. Obviously the more followers you have, the more likely you are to be retweeted. However, it isn’t just about retweeting other people’s content or dishing out promotions. It’s about engaging in conversation with people in the industry.

5. Number of Fans (Facebook)

You’ll need to create your own corporate profile on Facebook, which brings the same potential banana skins as a corporate Twitter feed, only multiplied numerous times due to the sheer level of engagement of people on Facebook. However, if you decide to engage with customers and potential customers on Facebook, the total number of likes your page receives will add value to your URL.

6. Number of Comments (Facebook)

A large number of likes, but little engagement, is a sure sign of someone gaming the system. People will tend to like you if you talk to them. Successful Facebook pages include a lot of content written by other people.

7. Number of Views (YouTube)

An obvious one, but any content you upload to YouTube should link to your site in the description, and the more times it is viewed, the more value will be attributed to your video.

8. User Comments (YouTube)

YouTube is also about engaging with other YouTubers and commenting on popular videos. The more you comment, the more link juice is passed back to your profile.

9. References From Independent Profiles (YouTube)

Using YouTube can bring in some really good authority if done brilliantly — if your link from your video passes some value, imagine how much more value would be passed if you could get other people to parody your work and include links to you from their profiles. The prime example remains the Cadbury’s Gorilla, but there are lots of interesting mini-campaigns trying to leverage the above.

10. Title of Video (YouTube)

Any references to your target keywords in the title of the video will help ensure that any authority passed will be relevant to a specific theme. Keywords should also be in the tags and or transcript where possible.

11. Percent of Likes vs. Dislikes (YouTube)

Easy one. The more liked your content is, the more authoritative it is.

12. Positive vs. Negative Brand Mentions (All Social Media)

Use a tool like Radian6, or a free tool, and ensure that you have significantly more positive brand mentions than negative. It won’t be 100 percent accurate as these things don’t pick up on sarcasm. But Google has already made investment in this area in 2011, so it’s well worth monitoring.

13. Number of Social Mentions (All Potential Media)

Total visibility across all social media shows that your content is important to all people and not just a result of a large special offer for Facebook/Twitter users. HowSociable is a simple way of giving yourself a rating here.

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, Feb 16 2011

Alex Cohen yesterday wrote about how paid results are increasingly getting clicks at the expense of organic results in “PPC vs. SEO: Paid Search as Your Organic Competitor.”

Today, we’ll look at some of the changes in how we attribute value in SEO, and how we’re increasingly turning to tactics that were previously considered to be the realm of paid search professionals in order to meet client expectations.

Three trends have led this charge:

1.A clear and continuing drop in the value of major generic keywords in natural search (historic data, Google products, use of search).
2.Renewed interest in exactly how the “halo” effect of optimization works and how ROI can be attributed.
3.Speed of results from good optimization.
Drop in Generic Keywords in Natural Search

This has been driven partly by people and partly by the search engines. Check Google Trends for any number of “high volume” generic keywords (car insurance, televisions, loans, dishwashers, handbags, etc.) and you’ll see a consistent trend over the last five years.

While I wouldn’t necessarily put 100 percent faith in the figures, they would reflect a degree of reality from what I see in client campaigns.

Look at searches for [televisions]:

Aside from drop in volumes, the space attributed to natural search results has been quite drastically cut in a number of areas.

Paid search results consistently give three listings at the top of the page now, with sitelinks and product feed results too. They can even push natural search listings below the fold on some screens.

To further complicate matters, there are now many more “products” (e.g., local business results, shopping feed listings) to compete against. In a world where rankings used to really matter, position three is no longer position three.

Renewed Focus on ‘Halo’ Search Traffic

Anyone who has ever optimized their own website will tell you that building links for a certain keyword (e.g., “hamster cage”) will improve your ranking. But these links, as well as URL and branded links, will also improve the overall authority of your site after you get your first number one ranking, making it easier for your site to rank more easily for other keywords.

Attributing this value, however, is actually quite hard unless you’re starting from scratch.

The upshot has been that keyword ranking reports are getting bigger and bigger in order to more clearly show traffic increases as direct results of specific keyword ranking improvements. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as other metrics like the total number of keywords driving traffic are also considered.

This is in turn moving us toward reports that include so much keyword data that merging PPC and SEO reports at keyword level could become much easier.

It has also meant that the keywords being targeted for SEO are bigger in number. Consider making bigger lists of categorized keywords for SEO a part of your strategy.

SEO Techniques Work Much Quicker Than Ever Before

This can be attributed to a number of factors and developments. But the sheer speed of indexing from Google in particular has undoubtedly been a factor.

On the plus side: small keywords can be targeted more easily, as the results of your activities are that much quicker and more transparent than ever before.

All in all, the keyword research and granular focus of PPC is becoming ever more a part of SEO — and this is no bad thing!

This morning, the world of SEO had one of its almost quarterly fits of agitation, involving much commentary, re-tweeting and blogging (oh, the irony ). Usually this chatter is a response to some Google update or other and results in apocalyptic predictions of ‘SEO is dead’ etc. This time however, the news is the announcement that JC Penney has been (probably) buying links from unrelated sites and this had led to their ranking at position 1 for all kinds of products that they sell on their site, but has now led to a big Google slap-down. For the inward-looking amongst us in the UK, JC Penney is a bit like Debenhams. The story was carried by the New York Times and can be found here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=penneyjccompany

The main bit of news in the story is that a company can get great natural search rankings by getting links from what would be considered by most SEOs to be pretty low-quality link partners, and that now they have been caught out, JC Penney are 1. Claiming to have known nothing about those links being built by an outside contractor, and 2. removing those links as Google has given them a penalty.

In response to point 1, many digital marketing departments are now asking whether or not they could be in a similar position. From Steak’s point of view, none of our clients have link profiles like the one in the story in the NYT, and many of our clients can log into our link building reporting software at any time to see the links we have identified, made contact with and added so they can audit the quality themselves. Those that aren’t set up on this reporting tool can request link building reports separately should they wish.

Ultimately, this is good news for the SEO industry, it should increase Google’s focus on rewarding relevant links above volume of links, and ensure that agencies which focus on best practice will outperform those which like to try and find ways to beat the system. It is also a tiny little win for agencies like Steak who are prepared to be completely transparent in their approach to SEO.

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, Jan 19 2011

Two subjects have been prominent in search engine optimization (SEO) over the last month or so: the quality of sites appearing in Google’s results, and the impact of social media links on ranking.

We noticed a couple of fairly major changes on Sunday in rankings for a couple of verticals where the volume of contextual links and number of linking domains were favored.

This is different than the trend we saw in November/December when on-site content, social media visibility, and especially link profile diversity were favored.

Although this is a heavily generalized summary of what we saw, it strongly indicates that while social media links have been increasingly making their presence felt in the SERPs, the engines (in particular Google) may be responding to an increase in “manipulative social activity.”

Perhaps Google has changed how it treats these links since the announcement that social media activity is indeed a ranking factor, (although it’s still unclear how big a portion of the algorithm they occupy).

While a lot of testing and theorizing is occurring in the SEO community regarding the what, why, and how of social media as a ranking factor, there are certain fundamentals of using social media as part of your campaign that aren’t likely to change — some simple dos and don’ts.

There are many factors to take into account when looking at individual social sites; the points below are meant to act as a general guide.

Do:

• Forge real social relationships in your verticals. Having a large number of followers/friends is nice, but it’s the people you have a one-to-one connection with who are more likely retweet, share, and Like your content.
• Pay attention to the numbers you can’t see. With social media it’s easy to get caught up with simple metrics like number of tweets, followers, and friends when assessing the value of an individual’s social profile. You’d be better served examining the entire “profile web” associated with that person. Are their followers also authoritative (who follows the followers)? Are they semantically relevant? How widely are their contributions shared (and by who)?

Don’t:

• Expect a ranking spike every time. But monitor the different conditions under which they occur and note correlations.
• Rely on the big numbers. Again, certain metrics and be misleading. You wouldn’t just look at visible PageRank when prospecting for links.
• Spam! This should go without saying, but doing things like firing out post after post of nothing but promotional material, paying bots for retweets, etc., won’t do much other than alienate both users and search engines alike.

As with regular backlinks, it’s quality and not necessarily quantity that will win the day with social SEO.

It’s also important to note that the more traditional, contextual, anchor text focused link is by no means dead and buried. The mantra for the “future proof” natural search campaign should remain: “create valuable content, share appropriately, and target a wide range of channels.”

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, Dec 15 2011

It’s that time of year again. SEO bloggers are either looking back at their predictions for 2010 and seeing how right (or wrong) they were, or making entirely new predictions for 2011 — possibly because they were so wrong last year that it wasn’t worth looking back?

I want to focus on just one prediction for 2011 and then go ahead and try to make it happen on behalf of my clients. This seems like a more simple task than coming up with five or 10 predictions, knowing that some of them were made up simply so that I could fill a blog post.

The big news in SEO recently was the revelation that social media signals affect natural search rankings, from interviews with people at both Google and Bing — although no indication was given to how much they affect rankings.

To be fair, if you were a search engine and wanted to know what brands, websites, and general content people wanted to interact with online, where would you go first? It has an added benefit for those who think that the SERPs are a bit spammy (I’m not one of them, for the record).

One way of reducing the number of arguably lower quality websites would be to look at who the popular brands are in the social media space and try to reward them with more authority.

How can SEOs take advantage of what seems to be a clear shift toward sentiment as an extra factor in achieving better rankings?

A growing number of SEO techniques can be undertaken with SEO, and specifically link building, in mind — from PR and advertorials to advertising on relevant industry websites.

In 2011, I expect this to become more closely tied with clients’ overall marketing campaigns. The best way to explain this is with an example:

Client A is a retailer, looking to boost sales of a specific range of camping equipment products. Special offers, promotions, and TV advertising is all planned and will revolve around a creative execution involving a character who will appear in their ads.

The opportunities for SEO here are endless, and need to be part of the initial planning, not an afterthought. For example:

•TV ads to be backed up with a strong PR campaign, aimed at increasing the number of brand and URL links to the client’s site.
•The specialist nature of the goods is such that a blogger outreach campaign can be undertaken, looking for product reviews, advertising opportunities, contextual links, or at least deep links from these relevant sites.
•The ad campaign’s character will have a Facebook and Twitter presence. If it is an engaging campaign, they will get a lot of followers and their profile will have strong social signals, which can then add value when linking back to the site.
•Key influencers for this market on Twitter and Facebook can be contacted and encouraged to review products, follow the main character and will retweet, “Like,” and re-post special offers or product insights.
•A campaign to win a free camping stove can be run as an “online game” (like the “throw the penguin” game, for example) and embedded on blogger sites to increase usage. It can also contain backlinks.
This gives us a “natural” balance between followed and no-followed links, contextual versus brand and URL links, from a variety of highly relevant sources, and also leverages the social media “buzz” metrics as further opportunities.

The point is that SEO, rather than being purely an ongoing process of optimization, will be more influential as part of a campaign-led marketing strategy. In 2011, we’ll need to work with our clients to ensure this happens.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Thanks to some great investigative journalism, and a degree of open-ness from the two major search engines, we now have a degree of confirmation that social media links and mentions are indeed part of the ranking algorithms. This post appeared on Search Engine Land yesterday and confirms what many in the industry have been saying, publicly or privately for some time now.

Much of this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone in SEO, the engines are always looking to refine their algorithms to serve better results based on what people expect to see when they search for particular keywords. Where better to look for that data then in the social media arena?

What this means for clients depends, to a degree on what their existing social media footprint looks like. No one should be advocating building hundreds of fake social media profiles and spamming everyone to death, the message from Google is as always leaning towards quality over quantity. So it would be more beneficial to get mentioned by one person with 750,000 followers than to get thousands of mentions from people with 0.

At Steak we don’t see Social media and SEO as mutually exclusive in terms of outreach, building relationships with key influencers and CRM policy in general. Using Social Media to build search authority means that it is more crucial than ever to ensure that campaigns are engaging innovative open and organic.

We have all seen the PR disasters from the likes of Nestle on their Facebook profile, and Google’s message is that far from  increasing your ranking due to getting lots of coverage, the negativity of that coverage will act to reduce ranking value rather than improve it.

What this means for clients is that alongside all of the KPI metrics that an SEO agency should monitor and take steps to improve, the following metrics should be added:

-      number of posts made

-      number of SM mentions (probably categorized into Twitter/Facebook etc)

-      number of direct responses (positive v negative)

-      number of links

That’s arguably not an exhaustive list, tools like Radian 6 may throw up other potential ranking factors that could be monitored. The key as always in SEO is to keep on top of what people are doing on the web and always consider how the information they share could be useful indicators of quality, how you might impact it for the better on behalf of your clients (or how they could impact on it themselves) and test your SEO theories whenever you get the chance.

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, Nov 17 2011

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important factors for success when running almost any online business these days. Having the ability to ensure your customers can go to a search engine and easily find your business’s website is absolutely invaluable in both B2C and B2B markets.

For many, the answer is to hire an in-house expert and ensure that their recommendations are followed. However, for many — especially in more competitive online industries — the risk and costs of employing the one expert or even a small team is outweighed by the reassurance of using an agency and benefiting from service level agreements, broader knowledge bases, and insight from other SEO campaigns in different markets.

So what are the key factors in choosing an SEO agency and why are they important? These are my top five tips.

1. Look for an agency to show examples of using different SEO techniques to bring results.

Every client will have different requirements in order to achieve great results. For some there will be major content requirements; for others the focus may be on improving their link profile.

If your agency can show examples of achieving quick results by using a range of different on-page and off-page techniques then you can feel secure that they will be able to diagnose changes accurately and act appropriately. It will also mean that if results aren’t improving, they won’t simply carry on doing the same things in the hope of a change of fortune.

2. Find an agency that will be able to work closely with your developers, content teams, and other agencies.

Your agency should be like an extension of your team. With SEO a range of elements will lead to success. Your agency needs to be able to work closely with tech teams, creatives, as well as potentially with your paid search, PR, display agencies, and more.

3. Don’t underestimate the value of sector knowledge, but also ensure you won’t get the same approach as taken for another client (see point 1).

An SEO agency that knows your market can be valuable for a number of reasons, including having an understanding of appropriate keyword strategies, competitor insights, and an idea of how to engage with relevant link partners. What’s important to remember, however, is that you’ll need an approach that isn’t exactly the same as everyone else in the market.

4. Try and avoid any agency that claims to have a ‘network’ of their own sites for link building.

The ability to affect your client’s link profile quickly and cost effectively can be of huge value. But if you’re looking for an agency and they believe that one of the biggest selling points they have is that they have their own network of sites they can call on for links, that is generally a bad sign.

There are numerous examples of sites that link out exclusively to clients of the same SEO agency — this isn’t something you really want as part of your link profile. It’s better to use a range of different techniques to build links, not just the one.

Also, a network can be used as a way to force you into using the agency. Leave them, and they kill your link profile and lower your rankings.

5. Look for an agency that is willing to be completely transparent in how they work.

If you can find an SEO agency that’s happy to show you exactly what they do in building links, in investigating indexing issues, in understanding competitor site profiles, etc., then you can be more confident in seeing the value that they’re adding, and be sure that there will never be any hidden issues or any use of black hat techniques.

So, those are my recommendations based on my experiences both client and agency side. There are literally hundreds of individual questions you could look to get an SEO agency to answer but these are the areas I would suggest any in-house team focuses on when looking to appoint an agency.

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, Oct 20, 2010

The SEOMoz team caused an amusing furore when they calculated that a new metric they had discovered had more correlation between high LDA scores and high rankings than any other factor.

LDA, or latent Dirichlet allocation, is effectively one way of measuring relevance without counting keywords, so a crawling tool can “read” two pieces of copy and rate them according to which is better written. It does this by looking for related keywords rather than necessarily for the actual keyword itself.

As a quick example, I know that a block of text mentioning “petrol money,” “excitement,” “anticipation,” and “gutted” is more relevant to a keyword search for [Liverpool FC fan blog] than a block of text mentioning “Anfield,” “Kenny Dalglish,” and “Champions.”

Search engines need this type of insight into content to make their results more accurate. Plus, it has the added benefit of being able to pick out spammy, badly written, or spun content.

What was particularly amusing was how worked up some of the search engine optimization (SEO) community got about this factor. Taking away for a second that the original calculations were wrong anyway and that actually, having a high “LDA” score isn’t as much of a secret to top rankings as it was first claimed — it remains an important point that there are more than 200 ranking factors.

Some factors are certainly more influential on rankings than others, but in an increasingly competitive environment, it seems to me that it is better to do 100 things 1 percent better, rather than one thing 100 percent better. Sounds like the type of advice I would get from my dad, actually, but it’s probably right for SEO.

Let’s look at some examples to highlight what we’re talking about here. Here are the top 10 results for [car insurance] and the number of times each ranking page mentions “car insurance” specifically:

As you can see, there is actually an inverse relationship here, so Google can see that the content is about the same theme, and could even be penalizing content that mentions the keyword too many times.

Moving onto some keyword search for [televisions], the same is true here — fewer mentions = better results:

But here’s where it got interesting! Doing the same for [dresses] shows that the more times the keyword was mentioned, the higher the ranking!

One thing we sometimes forget to do in SEO is to look at a much bigger picture than numbers of links, LDA scores, keyword density, and remember to think about the full user journey — a human user journey — and optimize for that.

Google has a lot of very clever people working on a lot of very advanced algorithms. Rather than trying to keep up and discover ways of cheating the system, we should spend more time looking at how a human sees our sites and engages with them, and how a well-run advertising campaign or a brilliant social strategy would affect our link profile and try to mirror that.

When they manage to crack the algorithm for identifying sarcasm, they will truly be able to build a picture of the web and what people are thinking — plus they can sell it to the Americans as an app (joking!).

So, by all means, keep up with the latest metrics for success. Read into how the search engines are evolving their algorithms. But don’t forget that no single metric is 100 percent of the picture.

No top ranking site is the best for every ranking factor. Each keyword will likely have a different search relevance profile.

Most importantly, don’t forget people have to actually use your site and read your content when they get there.

Also don’t forget on-page optimization is dead.

As you were.