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.

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, Sep 22 2010

In the last couple weeks we’ve seen the introduction of Google Instant results and subsequently a heap of excited blog posts about the impact it will have on the industry, SEO, and clients the world over. As often happens, the news became a trending topic on the media industry-heavy Twitter, and the impact of Google Instant on people who actually use Google for something other than their job was slightly lost in the noise.

Early results suggest it hasn’t actually changed anything to any large degree. Certainly my mother still doesn’t know what it is and my wife found it irritating and switched it off as soon as I showed her how. I’ll stick my neck on the line (hey, why not?) and bet that it will have disappeared by February.

While the impact of Google Instant is interesting for SEOs, there are plenty of other interesting strategies to discuss that can actually have an “instant” impact. Today.

How about a website ranking number one for [car insurance] with only four links pointing to it with “car insurance” as the anchor text? Pretty interesting, right? For such a competitive keyword you might expect somewhat more volume than this, out of a total number of inbound links less than any other site on the first page…

Last time, we discussed why you shouldn’t be afraid of URL links, and why they’re actually more likely to suggest a natural link profile. There have also been some other more detailed posts looking further into this and so it wasn’t much of a surprise seeing that a number of sites with very spammy-looking backlink profiles were penalized — it’s not like Google hasn’t been warning people about this for a while.

Right now we have instances of clients who are well-known within their markets — good websites providing useful content — but they aren’t ranking precisely because they have too many site-wide links, too many links that are dofollow, and too many contextual links (remember I said last month a good link looks like this — cheap viagra? — well forget it).

By “too many,” I mean as a percentage of overall links, all adding up to a link profile that is completely unnatural. We’re improving their positions by actively removing links, and the only links coming in are branded, URL links from highly relevant sites.

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The challenge this poses for some SEO agencies is that they have got their approach to link building so ingrained that they haven’t spotted some of these trends. Instead, they put more effort into building the wrong kind of links, making the situation worse for their clients.

This means that SEOs and agencies need to consider not just how to build quality links for clients but how to actively manage the link profile and ensure that the right links are being built.

For some, this will mean the normal contextual links, derivatives of them, and a few branded, long tail and URL links as well. For others, it will be weeding out site-wide contextual links, replacing them with higher quality branded and URL links, and even building some nofollowed links from social media and PR sites.

In short, it will pay to be able to take a step back from what you’re doing and analyze what the client needs in a bit more detail.

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, Aug 24, 2010

Search engine optimizers know what makes a good link. It looks like this – cheap Viagra - and it links through to your client’s page selling Viagra.

But half the job of good SEO is also keeping on top of what the search engines look for when deciding what’s important. The rules are always changing.

How Many Contextual Links Really Look ‘Natural’?

There’s a slight problem with doubting the importance of quality links with clear anchor text: they work. Without a doubt, the most important element of improving your natural search ranking is to get quality inbound links with anchor text that reflects your target keywords. SEO is still a numbers game at its heart — do enough of the right things and you’ll rank number one.

But this is where SEOs need to think about what the search engines see when they manually check what results are being served and decide if the best suppliers are ranking well, or if it’s just the biggest spammers.

What Makes a Link Relevant, Important, and Contextual?

There are plenty of examples of links created by SEOs with great anchor text. But if a gas and electricity link near the bottom of an article on cooking is actually “contextual,” then I’m the Pope.

The dictionary definition of “contextual,” just to labor the point, means “relating to, dependent on, or using context.”

Clearly, anchor text doesn’t always make a link contextual. We’ve all seen examples of irrelevant articles with links at the bottom. This is bad practice, bad for the user, and ultimately bad for SEO.

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You can certainly make the case that links with relevant anchor text are all that matters — that “Google isn’t actually as clever as you think” — and the SERPs will back up that view in the vast majority of cases. But staying ahead of the curve is just as important as finding ways to enhance your ranking in the first place. If Google is planning an update to reduce the power of spammers, then this is where they should start.

My Recommendation

Monitor and manage the spread of URL versus keyword-rich links across your client’s profile and don’t be afraid of getting really high quality links that only use your client’s URL.

At a broader level, it’s also important to try and build a database of the most important and relevant sites, and even individuals in each sector you target. Try to genuinely engage with them, through direct contact, through affiliate and display deals, and by using other more creative methods (where appropriate) to build strong business relationships online that add value to users and provide SEO value for the engines.

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, July 28, 2010

My last post, “What’s Next for Search, SEO?,” managed to produce some interesting takes on the future, past, and present of devices and how we use them/optimize for them. Thanks for your responses. They got me thinking — what year am I stuck in?

The simple answer is that I never quite came to terms with the ’90s. Having been born in 1980, I just couldn’t accept that a new decade had anything to do with me. Plus, my football team was unbeatable in the ’80s and is now average at best. So if I were really pressed for an answer, I’d say I was stuck in 1988. Early May, to be precise.

But I’ve also noticed some definite differences in search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns and approaches to SEO from agencies and in-house teams that can give clues about when they last carried out a root and branch review of how they do SEO.

Since 2000, SEO has been developing as an art and as a defined function of marketing. Each year has tended to see specific approaches and developments that have helped to define how you should approach SEO. If 2005 was about internal linking, then 2009 was about optimized PR and advertorials.

What I’m particularly interested in is defining SEO in 2010. This isn’t necessarily about finding something new, more about what seems to really be producing results after the Caffeine update and the May Day changes.

The trend we’re seeing is that highly relevant links from sites with quality link profiles of their own are adding the most value to an SEO campaign, rather than those with outright PageRank (we have also seen a large number of sites suffer ranking drops due to an inordinate number of sitewide inbound links, but that’s another story).

This may not be anything new in itself — highly relevant links have always been important and difficult to come by for a number of reasons. But the reduction in apparent value of PageRank, and increase in the value of a purely relevant site and content, is interesting.

What is doubly interesting (and helpful) is that Google has a tool that can specifically identify what those highly relevant sites might be. (It won’t actually get links from them, you’ll still have to be creative there).

The tool? Google Ad Planner — allowing you to see what sites match the same user profile as your client’s site, and also filter by industry sector/classification of the site, giving a neat picture of what Google feels is a relevant link profile for your client. You can then export a list of the best sites to target for links — it can even tell you which ones are using Google text ads on their site, thereby giving you a foot in the door to discuss advertising rates, content hosting, reciprocal links, or whatever you feel is the right approach for each site.

So, if there’s a theme for 2010, it has to be that taking the time to identify your market and focusing on how to build relationships with those relevant sites will put you above SEOs that are still focusing on optimized PR and advertorials. They’re stuck in 2009…

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, June 30, 2010

One of the points that will be high on the agenda at this year’s Online Marketing Show will be that the web has finally graduated from our PC monitors and now exists firmly in the air around us, waiting to be accessed at any given moment. Internet usage on mobile devices is now growing at the rate that was predicted some three or four years ago, making this year definitely, officially, the year of mobile… hooray!

It’s not all about mobile. Any number of devices during the next decade and beyond will be able to access the wonders of the Internet, and all of them will need to be able to search and quickly retrieve the information or websites that people are looking for. This is where search engines need to think about how their interfaces and results will work on any number of new devices.

Even on the biggest, prettiest smartphones, Google’s search results don’t fit on the screen, removing the majority of paid search listings that make up so much of Google’s revenue. If everyone were to use mobiles only to search for info, Google might even go bankrupt!

Google has a separate index for mobile devices, so it’s not as though they haven’t thought about this. But as the web becomes ever more accessible, two questions remain:

1.How will search engines really help users find what they’re looking for, especially on the smaller devices?
2.How will they continue to know what are the most important results for natural search?
The second question is particularly important for SEO. So much of what we do boils down to ensuring that the myriad of connections on the internet make it clear that our sites, or our clients’ sites, are viewed by the search engines as important. Not only important, but important for specific themes and keywords, and we manage this using techniques on and off the website itself.

So how does that change when people are using the Internet in different ways via different devices and potentially being given different results depending on what device they use? How will search engines know what is important, or whether something is more important for a mobile user than a tablet or laptop user?

There are still a lot of “ifs” involved here. Ultimately, the search engines might feel that what exists now is good enough to tell them which are the most important sites.

In SEO we’ve become accustomed in more recent times to viewing off-site optimization techniques as having the biggest impact on rankings. But perhaps there is an argument that for each device you will need a site specifically optimized for each different version of Google. Google for mobile, Google for smartphone, Google for tablets — each version might prefer different types of web property to display higher in the listings.

Ultimately, there isn’t a definitive answer right now. However, in the near future it’s likely that SEO will not only encompass social media (that’s if you believe it doesn’t already), but SEO teams may well need to ensure their skill-sets include a large degree of developer knowledge specifically for ensuring websites are compatible with multiple devices.

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, June 2, 2010
The biggest obstacle with actually integrating SEO activities with other business functions is that SEO people don’t talk to other teams enough.

This isn’t as harsh a criticism as it first sounds — we’re all busy in agencies and passionate about the subject and clients. Time is at a premium. So it isn’t as easy as just saying that SEOs are antisocial hermits tucking themselves away in corners.

Good SEO doesn’t happen in a vacuum, as we all know. There are many ranking factors that are specifically aimed at ensuring SEO happens as part of a natural online marketing presence and not just a focus on the one goal of getting traffic from Google.

Happily, there is a big plus side to this for digital agencies, as a good display campaign, affiliate campaign, and social media campaign will all help your SEO progress for a range of reasons. Here’s a quick list of considerations for SEO teams.

Speak to Your Display Team

Always try and negotiate content hosting arrangements with media buys. If you’re buying banner ads on a site, then see if they will also host press releases or product reviews with backlinks.

Alternatively, ask your display/media team for their list of contacts at key industry sites and see if you can negotiate a deal separately.

Finally, see if you can put clean links within display ads so that all ad placements pass direct value back to the client’s site.

Speak to Your Affiliate Team

If you’re running a good affiliate campaign, see if you can negotiate clean links or content hosting alongside your affiliate links. Some sites already add a clean link as well as a standard affiliate link as a matter of course.

See if you can get a list of affiliate contacts and negotiate deals to put useful content on their sites — good quality product reviews, for example, can be of real interest.

Speak to Your Social Media Team

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It may be jumping the gun slightly, as there is no conclusive data or any confirmation from Google, but I’ll join the ranks of SEOs already going with this. A well-run social media campaign will have SEO benefits. If you can get people talking about your special offers on LCD TVs for the World Cup, then you will rank better for related keywords.

One of the benefits of a well-run social media campaign is that key influencers will be identified and directly engaged. Get your social media team to help you out by trying to get that all-important content onto the key blogger sites.

These are some simple solutions to the age-old problem of getting links from important and relevant sites. And remember, if you’re extra charming, you might even get other teams to get those links for you — double whammy!

From Gareth Owen, Head of SEO…

“Calls to action in TV ads will be hugely important for SEO – the iPad will be sat on someone’s lap while they watch TV and it will be SO easy to get them to do a search for ‘LCD TVs’ and click on the Dixons result. Even if it is in P5 you can still ask people to do it – the clickthroughs from that alone are a massive ranking factor.

Beyond SEO, I think this does cement a whole new way of advertising to people on TV – ‘Download our app now’, ‘play our quiz game now for 10% off’. 

What the iPad really introduces, more than anything else is the world of micropayments. If someone asks me to put in my card details to pay 60p so I can view some content I won’t bother. If it asks me to do it through my iTunes via a one-click ordering system, I might. The success of this can be demonstrated by Amazon, with an enormous conversion rate and sales via the mobile version of their site that would put anyone to shame.”

From Betina Bell, Account Manager…

“As its mobile predecessor experienced, the announcement of the iPad has come under intense scrutiny for all its perceived failings as a kind of computer, kind of mobile. However, what these non-believers fail to comprehend is that it isn’t masquerading at all. In fact, it is plugging a gap and fulfilling a demand where there previously was none – an achievement in itself. Providing wider accessibility with its simple aesthetic and promising covetability from those around you, including, albeit through gritted teeth, those disapproving non-believers.

For Display, it remains to be seen whether it will enjoy the same success and cult status as its smaller kin. We’ll be eager to segment and target to understand the demographic of its users and keen to see how advertisers react to its lack of Flash support. Our challenge as marketers is how to engage users, if this is to be a coffee table product. Given that the first model doesn’t allow a machine to machine connection, the iPad is very much challenged by the all-consuming TV.”

Steak has been appointed by DSG international plc (‘DSGi’), one of Europe’s leading specialist electrical retailing groups and UK market leaders, to work on behalf of its UK brands Currys, Dixons.co.uk and PC World. The account, won in a four-way agency pitch, will see Steak provide search engine optimisation services to DSGi, creating defined natural search strategies for each of the three brands to achieve online revenue targets and effective integration with other digital and offline marketing activities.

Gareth Owen, Head of Natural Search at Steak said, “This is an exciting opportunity to enhance the digital face of three major retail names and reinforce the strength of their offline brands in the digital space.”

David Walmsley, eCommerce Director at DSGi added, “As part of our strategy to win on the internet and take DSGi’s multichannel business to the next level, it is vital for us to build a stronger search presence. We were impressed with Steak’s energy, insight, expertise, and proven track record in delivering results for major retailers. I’m pleased to be working with Steak on this next phase of business growth, and am confident they will help drive our online brands forward.”