Pro Blog Service

You are here: Home / Archives for All Posts / Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization

By

Search and Social: A Partnership for the Ages

Robbie Williams is an SEO Consultant at Slingshot, and wrote this guest post in exchange for a guest post I wrote for their website.

Robbie Williams
Robbie Williams. I love his version of 'Somewhere Beyond the Sea' from Finding Nemo

What grabs a social media guru’s attention faster than mentioning the term “social media guru?”

The answer: Providing data-driven ROI statistics for their industry and, better yet, doing it in conjunction with SEO.

Worked, didn’t it?

Now that I have your attention, I want you to dabble in my thoughts for a moment.

I’ve often pondered how a social media practitioner would address the topic of “Search and Social” as they are the two dominating powers on the Internet. Now I know. They turn to the SEO professionals to address it.

As we all know, the Google algo is one of mankind’s best kept secrets. So I’m not going to come out and tell you that I know anything in my industry to be a 100% fact — aside from what Google tells us directly (which often keeps me up at night). However, I can back up my opinions and observations with the experience of day-in, day-out SEO practice, where dealing with rankings for an array of keywords is my entire world.

Within this digital domain, I’ve had first-hand experience with the algorithm and how it responds to certain human signals; e.g., social signals. However, (drumroll please….) social signals alone have yet to produce an identifiable, data-proven effect on rankings in the majority of SERPs. So yes, given the access to the data streams of Twitter and Facebook, there has been a trace amount of evidence where social media has had a noticeable effect on rankings in certain keyword search queries.

Now, back to proving ROI for social media with search. We all know how powerful social media has become and it’s not unreasonable to think that Google doesn’t realize it too. As a matter of fact, it has attempted to gain access to the Twitter and Facebook “fire hoses” (the full feed of information behind their massive firewalls) but to no avail … yet. As soon as this happens, you better believe that social media is going to have a significant effect on rankings, and it’s only a matter of time.

***Disclaimer: As an SEO professional, I am required to mention the discussion Correlation vs. Causation when discussing this topic. So here it goes: a page/brand/keyword will typically have social cues surrounding it because it’s a good page/brand/keyword and it will rank accordingly because of this. The reverse is not true, a page/brand/keyword will not rank only because it has social. In the world of SEO, it’s never that simple.***

Imagine a graph illustrating the respective positions of traffic-driving, conversion-producing keywords in individual SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Now overlay it with another graph of social media activity that’s been strategically produced around the same SEO keywords.

What do you see? Positive correlation (not necessarily causation). Additionally, imagine a Google Analytics graph showing increased conversion, increased on-page time and click-through rates, as well as a decrease in user bounce rates for those same keywords and their associated pages, overlaid on top. (I’m drooling at the thought of this, I don’t know about you…)

Boom. professional search engine optimization company. Aside from work, he loves being outside; running, mountain biking, adventure racing, etc. Robbie’s current motto: If you keep life full, you never have time to worry about tomorrow.

By

How to Help Google Identify Authors of Content on Your Site

Google is changing the web again. This time, they are asking webmasters to begin identifying authors in a way that allows:

  • Google to track who is the author of content
  • Google to track about the author pages (called profiles by Google).
  • Authors to authenticate their profiles (author pages) on multiple websites.

If you are an author, this is fantastic… and if you are a content publisher, it’s even better because Google is now starting to look at who writes, not just the cold math behind an article.

To acknowledge an author, you use the HTML5  rel attribute in a link pointing to an “about the author” page on the same website like this:

Article written by <a rel="author" href="../authors/mikeseidle">Mike Seidle</a>

Because most authors have profile (about the author pages) on multiple websites, Google has a way to link them together. The first step is to put a link to the author’s website on the profile with a rel=”me” attribute like this:

<a rel="me" href="http://mikeseidle.com/about">Read more about Mike</a>

On the page mikeseidle.com/about, we have to insert a recriprocal link back to the above about the author page (profile)  with the rel=”me” attribute:

<a rel="me" href="https://problogservice.com/authors/mikeseidle">How To Help Google Identify Authors of Content on Your Site</a>

Before all you search engine optimization experts get your hair on fire about reciprocal links causing bad things to happen to your page rank, here’s the link on Google’s Webmaster Tools that shows that it is required by Google to do a reciprocal link.

As of the time this post was written, most blogging software does not support the new author tagging features yet, so you’ll either have to write a plug in or embed your own links. I would expect to see support for author and profile tagging to be included in future versions of WordPress soon.

 

By

Copywriters, Use the Words Other People Use, Not the Ones You Use

Do you know what audio theater is? Does it make you think of something to do with speakers at a movie theater? Or maybe it’s a subset of home theater equipment. Or maybe you’re supposed to go to a play and shut your eyes.

It’s none of those. It’s what we used to call radio theater. (Or radio theatre, if you’re Canadian or British. Or a snooty purist.)

Cast of Decoder Ring Theatre, an audio theatre company in Toronto.

You know what radio theater is, right? Remember when Ralph and Randy sat in front of the big giant radio and listened to Little Orphan Annie? We all know what that is, even the people who only hear about it from their grandparents.

But the people who actually do radio theater want to call it “audio theater” instead. Why? Because people don’t listen to the plays on the radio anymore, they listen to them on CD players, iPods, computers, car stereos, etc.

So in order to be more accurate, they changed the name of the art form to more accurately reflect what it is that they produce.

And lost out on a large portion of their potential audience.

There are still plenty of people who used to listen to radio theater with money to spend, but they don’t spend it on the entertainment form from their childhoods because they don’t know it’s called “audio theater” now. Companies like Decoder Ring Theatre have worked hard to overcome this hurdle by being one of the most progressive and dedicated audio theatre troupes I’ve ever seen, embracing social media and Internet marketing, as well as podcasting. (Full disclosure: Decoder Ring Theatre produced and aired six of my Slick Bracer radio plays this summer.) But a lot of other companies have only seen a fraction of this success, and I believe it’s primarily because of this language disconnect between what is “correct” and what is “best.”

How many times have companies harmed their marketing efforts by insisting people call a term by what they want to call it, not what the customers want to call it? How many times have government agencies lost the respect and credibility they worked for, because someone who knows nothing about public communication insisted the agency use the accurate term, not the best term? How many news programs get laughed at because they try to change the commonly accepted term to something that better suits their political biases?

  • An agricultural equipment company I know calls its products by the term they want to use, rather than the more common term their customer uses. This is evidenced by the 1,200 Google searches for their term, and the 20,000+ searches for the common term. While they may rank well for their chosen term, they don’t rank at all for the term their potential customers are using nearly 8 times more often.
  • When the H1N1 epidemic flu first started, the public was calling it “swine flu,” but the media managed — with a lot of work — to get people to start calling it H1N1, because it was harming the pork industry. But the government agencies wanted to call it the human flu, and flu pandemic. Regardless of what they wanted to call it, the media ignored them
  • Fox News’ insistence on calling suicide bombers “homicide bombers,” as per the Bush White House, made them a laughing stalk among journalists and news watchers.

If you’re not sure whether people are using your terms or theirs, go to Google’s Keyword Tool and put in your term and any industry terms you can think of. See which terms have the most global (worldwide) searches and the most local (US) searches. The ones that win are the ones most people are using, and the ones you should be focusing on.

Update: Deleted “Audio” from “Decoder Ring Audio Theatre” above, because despite being a loyal listener for 5 years, and now a contributor, I still can’t get their name right.

By

Three Reasons Why Your Blog Needs to be Well-Written

If you can’t write, you won’t show up on the search engines.

That’s because Google is now looking at user experience as its primary ranking factor. That means, they check whether people are sticking around on your site, reading the great content you provided.

They also know when people leave your site because it sucked.

According to a Google employee, Wysz, on the Google Forums, Google uses a number of different signals to find low quality sites, including shallow or poorly written content. Here’s what Wysz says:

Our recent update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites, so the key thing for webmasters to do is make sure their sites are the highest quality possible. We looked at a variety of signals to detect low quality sites. Bear in mind that people searching on Google typically don’t want to see shallow or poorly written content, content that’s copied from other websites, or information that are just not that useful. In addition, it’s important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole.

This can be a bit of an ego blow if you actually create your own content. I mean, it’s one thing to try to trick Google with a bunch of crap copy that got puked out by an article spinner. You shrug your shoulders, say “it’s a fair cop,” and then figure out another way to peddle your penis pills.

But if you’re not trying to trick Google, it has to be the worst feeling to find that Google dinged you because your writing was shallow and poorly written.

While Google isn’t getting into the literary criticism business or making moral judgments about you as a person (that’s what Facebook is for), Google wants you to write good copy that uses proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Here’s why:

  • People spell and use grammar correctly when they search. That’s because Google will correct their spelling in a search. “Did you mean _____” appears at the top of the search engine if you typed in a word incorrectly. Or if they think you’re really stupid, they just ignore your word choice and do a search for the correct spelling, giving you the option to click the less desirable, incorrect choice.
  • People share awesome. Scott Stratten said this once, and I’m stealing it. If you write some great stuff, people are more likely to share it. That means people are more likely to link to it in their own blogs, which builds backlinks, which helps your Google juice. But, more importantly, Google is starting to tailor your search results, not with the “official objective” results, but with the results you are more likely to be interested in. For example, you Google “Moleskine notebooks.” Instead of getting the regular search results for Moleskines, you’ll see a blog post I wrote about the little black notebook in your results. You’ll either see it because we’re connected socially, or because someone in your circle shared it, tweeted it, or even left a comment.
  • Google is getting better at semantic search. That means, Google knows what you meant, rather than what you said (see #1). Combine that with the fact that programs like Microsoft Word can check your grammar, and I can see a day where Google uses a grammar checker in their indexing to weed out not only the shallow, poorly-written copy used by spammers, but start dinging the poorly-written copy from people who just can’t write to begin with. After all, Google is about providing the best user experience. So that may start including ranking “good” writing higher and “bad” writing lower. While I can’t see them using an Amazon.com review system to rank sites, I can see them pushing all the lunatic ramblings, misspellings, and drunken love poetry off the top pages.

If you’re a writer, this is one more reason to work on improving your craft. If you’re not a writer, this is a great reason why you need to improve. And if you’re a business trying to rank high in the search engines, this means you need to consider hiring a ghost blogger or other professional copywriter who actually knows what they’re doing.

Photo credit: Leo Reynolds (Flickr)

By

Google Wants You to be a Better Blog Writer

The days of schlocky web copy and $1/post off-shore blog writing are over.

Thanks to Google’s new Panda update, your writing can no longer suck. You can’t just get by on 8th grade writing skills, or by hiring an off-shore blog writer for a buck a post anymore.

The new Google Panda update stresses usability and the user experience over whether you have the right keywords in your title and body copy, and over backlinks. Oh sure, they’re still counted, but Google is not putting as much emphasis on those as they once were, thanks to the recent JC Penney backlinking scandal.

As a result of this, and other Google gaming-techniques that were being abused, Google said, “You know what? That’s it. No more trying to trick us. Now we’re going to start looking at what your users are doing.” (Watch the Rand Fishkin video at the bottom of this post for a much better explanation than I just gave.)

Now, Google is starting to pay attention to the user experience: Do they visit more than one page, which means they like what they see? Are they on for a minute or more, or do they bounce out after 10 seconds, which means you didn’t captivate them? Did they even visit your page when you were at the top of the search engine (i.e. did your page even look interesting)?

The short of it is, if your site sucks, people won’t visit. If they visit, they won’t stick around. And they certainly won’t subject themselves to more than one page of it.

So how do you get them to stick around? You’d better have great content. Not just good enough, not barely readable. Not “meh.” It needs to be awesome.
 
 
 

Photo credit: peromhc (Flickr)

By

Search Engine Optimization is NOT Gaming the System

I’ve heard the question so many times, I want to shout at something: “Isn’t SEO just gaming the system?”

Andrew Hanelly wrote a great post for SocialMediaExplorer.com about why search engine optimization would be important even if the search engines stopped running.

And he makes a solid argument for why we should practice SEO techniques, even if we’re not actually trying to win search.

But I want to respond to the people who think SEO is somehow distasteful, or even cheating. Those critics and nay-sayers who think SEO is “just gaming the system.”

No, it’s not. It’s participating in the system that’s already in place.

First of all, this is the system. You go to a search engine, you search for something like “Italian wedding soup recipes” or “how to repair a bicycle tire.” The search engine tries to deliver what you want, because it knows what it should deliver. It looks for certain clues, like the title of a website — “1,001 Italian Wedding Soup Recipes” — or keywords in the body copy, and gives you the results that it thinks will most effectively meet your requirements. That’s the system. If you want to succeed in the system, you have to do the things that tell the search engines you can provide exactly what the users are looking for.

Second, the search engines can tell if a site isn’t very useful. It gets rid of sites that are pretty much useless. So even if someone wanted to game the system, if they’re not providing useful or valuable content, the site will soon be dropped when no one visits it, so the system weeds out anyone who isn’t giving users the things they’re looking for.

Third, using black hat SEO tricks is gaming the system. It’s cheating, because it uses tricks that have been banned by the search engines. Using tiny text or invisible text to cram keywords onto a single page is cheating. Building link farms with thousands of links on a single page is cheating. People who do that are immediately banished from the index, and will never show up on the search engine results. So the system eliminates cheaters and Internet ne’er-do-wells.

Search engine optimization is just the way Internet marketing is done. It’s no more gaming the system than buying a targeted direct mail list, or translating a website into Spanish to reach Hispanic customers. There’s nothing wrong with it, and people are going to continue to use it, because it works.

Even the people who think “gaming the system” is somehow wrong use their own life optimization techniques without batting an eye.

Would you turn in a half-finished crappy resume, because writing a good resume is “gaming the system?” Would you submit an RFP that didn’t meet all the requirements, because turning in what you’re asked for is “gaming the system?” Is practicing for a sales presentation gaming the system?

Of course not. So why is search engine optimization — a common business practice — somehow gaming the system, when that’s the only system that’s available?

Until you find a viable alternative, this is the only system we’ve got.

Photo credit: VizzzualDotCom (Flickr)