Friday, 5 June 2015

The Collateral Damage of Google’s Link Policy

Google's "company philosophy" states "Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value." Over the last two years Google has rolled out a series of algorithm updates and public relations tactics that have lead the SEO industry to question this fundamental premise. Are links good or bad? What is the real difference between building and earning links? Has Google broken the Internet?

A Brief History of Linking

Before the Internet, writers would cite their sources in footnotes or a bibliography. The web allowed people to give a direct link to those sources for more information on a topic. Google started using links as an indicator that a site was a good one and moved that website to a place where more people would find it: Page one of the search results. Figuring out ways to create backlinks became a new industry. Some purposely manufactured links made for Google search results that weren't necessarily the best results. That's when everything went haywire.

Fear? Sometimes

Brett Bastello of Inseev Interactive received this message from a reporter who quoted him in an article: "Per our company guidelines, all the outsiders links are nofollow links." Bastello assumes this has to do with fear of a Google penalty and says, "unfortunately this thinking couldn't be further from the truth and the amount of misinformation circulating around this topic is astounding. Just as Wikipedia references outside websites, Google likes to see blogs and websites referencing other qualified and authoritative websites on similar topics. The reason the links on Wikipedia are nofollowed is because it is User Generated Content with a high possibility of abuse, however, as an editor of a website you have 100% of the content control, and thus, this eliminates virtually any possibility of abuse, therefore, these sites should be dofollowing the links."

Agreed. But, read Rand Fishkin's blog post about an unwarranted Google penalty. No wonder people are afraid!

Resources

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/opinion/2411268/the-collateral-damage-of-google-s-link-policy

Wednesday, 20 May 2015

Should You Customize Your SEO Strategy for Specific Niches?


Don’t let anyone fool you. SEO is not rocket science. There is a general formula with four major components to SEO that all SEOs follow if they want to be successful with their campaign: content, links, on-page optimization, and social media.

The big component that the success of your campaign hinges on is depth

The appropriate depth of your efforts depends on the niche and by what your competition is doing. Developing an appropriate strategy requires thinking, analysis, and time.

As if that is not enough, you need to consider the different goals of SEO. Rand Fishkin on Moz covers these in much depth here: The 6 Goals of SEO – Choosing the Right Ones for Your Business, so I will only provide a tiny synopsis of the different goals: SEO for raw traffic, SEO for E-Commerce Sales, SEO for Mindshare and Branding, SEO for lead acquisition and direct marketing, SEO for reputation management, and SEO for ideological influence.
You must choose your tactics for SEO based on the goals you have set for your business, as well as the different depth in strategy required by your niche.

In order to beat your niche’s competition, you must first execute proper research for your niche, beginning with the general components of SEO: Market research, competitor research, keyword research, content, links, on-page optimization, and social media.

Market Research & Competitor Research

Who is your competition? How deep is the industry you are targeting?

SEO Market Research & Competitor Research 

You should never start an SEO campaign blind. But, you shouldn’t copy your competition exactly, either. Performing market research into your competitors will help reveal exactly how much of their content is gaining traction and social shares, how much of their strategy is being devoted to link acquisition, how much they are focusing on content, what keyword phrases they are targeting, and many tactics that will help aid you in dethroning the number one spot.

I must stress: avoid copying your competition’s strategy exactly. Unless you are a super advanced SEO, you don’t know how Google is going to react to a specific link or piece of content. The problem with copying a competitor’s strategy compounds itself in the form of SEO penalties. By using the various SEO factors as indicators, rather than your overall exact strategy, you can still beat your competition by using white hat techniques that conform to Google’s guidelines. This will help you go after your niche effectively, and beat your competition. This can all be done without the worry of eventually falling under a Panda or Penguin penalty.

By the way, I know algorithmic changes make what some thought were good SEO strategies seem worthless. The thing is, what some people feel are good SEO strategies may actually fall into the area of gray hat or borderline black hat SEO.

Such myths have been perpetuated throughout the industry for so long that some believe they are solid strategies, when in fact, doing research into Google’s quality guidelines reveals they were never a solid white hat strategies. One example is that of link wheels, which falls directly under Google’s “link scheme” violation. When done too aggressively, you can be hit by Penguin. A usual good rule of thumb – if you doubt any particular link adds value and it’s only being done for SEO, don’t acquire it.

Keyword Research

What keywords is my competition using to drive traffic?

Finding the right keywords is the most important step of your SEO campaign. Keywords are the backbone of SEO and will drive your strategy – you should be researching your competition and how they are using keyword phrases. Not only should you be researching their on-page optimization and how they use these keywords, you should also be researching keyword phrases for search volume and how much traffic they will potentially drive to your site. Once you have built up the list of keywords, you can then begin setting up your editorial calendar and coming up with topics for your website.

Content Research

How much content are my competitors writing?

It’s not about creating content with the most amount of words, or content with the most amount of great ideas. It’s about creating interesting content that people care about, that they will want to share with their friends, and their friends will want to share with their friends.

People will NOT share boring content. This is called social amplification, and can greatly enhance the traction of any piece of content you write. (I will discuss the social component of content later in this article.) But, the fact remains, you should examine, as a general indicator, how much content your competition is creating, along with the kind of content they are creating that is successful.
  • How many words are they writing per article?
  • What is the general word count of the top competitors in that niche?
  • How many articles are they posting per week?
  • How many articles are they posting per month?
  • How are they using keywords in that content?
By analyzing your top 5-10 competitors and creating a spreadsheet with this information, you are now armed with appropriate information to take on the competition in that industry.

Link Research

Which competitors are under a penalty? Do they have bad link profiles?

SEO Link Research 

Links are no longer the be-all, end-all SEO success metric they used to be, but they remain an important part of an SEO campaign. Which is why it is important to deduce the link profile of your competitors. Using tools like Cemper’s Link Detox, Google Webmaster Tools, AHREFs, and Majestic SEO, you can examine the strength of your competitor’s link profile. By doing this for the top 10 websites on Google, you can get a good idea of what links are driving value to these top 10 sites that Google is rewarding.

It is important to consider the penalty end of things: Do NOT use your competition’s link profile as an actual strategy. You can, however, use their link profile and go after sites that are of high value and high quality, and that conform to Google’s quality guidelines. By focusing on the quality sites in that niche, you can dethrone the higher ranking competitors by building your linking strategy around those sites Google considers valuable.

Remember, even link acquisition strategies will vary between niches. A niche with an expansive market in industrious cities like Los Angeles will require a much larger marketing budget in order to see effective ROI from these link acquisition efforts. A niche with a smaller market in Garden Grove, California and surrounding cities, with a lower competition level among keyword phrases, will require less link building in order to be successful.

This is why researching different niches and varying your SEO strategy between said niches is so important. Not only does this impact your link acquisition, it also impacts your keyword research! Every niche has its own jargon, and this impacts how people search tremendously. By performing your due diligence on this research, you can build an effective SEO campaign that delivers on the all-important return on investment that your client is expecting.

On-Page SEO

How is my competition using keywords on-site?

SEO Keyword Research & Analysis 

This is another biggie that can vary between niches, and can vary between keyword phrases widely based on how people are searching. One niche can require the use of highly technical keyword phrases in its copy, along with the use of synonyms and antonyms. Another niche can use extremely simple language that lends itself to the bare minimum of on-page optimization.

The important lesson in this part of your research is to learn the following on the top 10 sites on Google:
  • What is your competition doing with those keyword phrases on-page?
  • How are they being used in the title tag?
  • How are they being used in the Meta description?
  • How are they being used in the Meta keywords (no, Google does not use meta keywords for ranking, but they DO use meta keywords in the pre-indexation caching part of the ranking process)?
  • How are those keywords being used in the content?
  • What frequency of keyword phrases is being used? (Note: I am talking about frequency of keyword phrases for relevance, NOT keyword density. An important caveat here is if you follow your competition’s strategy for keyword phrases you also run the risk of a Panda penalty if their keyword use looks spammy. Are their keywords being used on-page in a spammy way? Then create higher quality content that utilizes that similar keyword strategy.)
Even keyword strategy and on-page use can vary in frequency and scope depending on your niche, so it is important to spend time researching how your competition is using their keyword phrases on-site.

Social Media Research

How can I amplify the social reach of my content?

Social Media Research 

Much misinformation and speculation has been perpetuated in recent years about social media, and its impact on rankings. So much so, that Matt Cutts finally – a year ago – had to put the kibosh on this with his video where he stated that there are no signals like that in Google’s search ranking algorithm:


So where is the value of social? The value of social is through establishing trust and authority with Google by getting your content out to actual readers, which in turn impacts their knowledge graph in relation to your website and other content.

By using research as a thin indicator of what the competition is doing with social media, you can examine what is being successful in your industry:
  • Who re-shares content the most? This indicator can be used to establish who your new niche’s most influential people are on the network, and from there, you can gain insight into their followers and get them to share your content.
  • What kind of content is being shared the most?
  • What kind of content has the most actionable impact in general (likes, shares) across the big 4 social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and LinkedIn?
  • When is content being shared/liked the most?
  • How is content being shared?
  • Why is specific content being liked and shared the most?
You can use tools like BuzzSumo to gain a full understanding of recent, shareable content across keyword phrases in your new niche, and Twellow to ascertain who the best influencers are. Then, examine how your competition’s content is performing across these social networks using the cues and indications mentioned above.

Without Customization of Your SEO Strategy, You Are Toast

Any Google search result can be as different as the keyword phrase itself, from singular to plural to its synonyms and antonyms. By performing your due diligence and researching your target niche, you can customize your SEO strategy. The customization of your strategy is an essential step, because boilerplate SEO no longer works. Search has gotten so complex in the last 5 years with multiple layers to Google’s algorithm, that it is no longer as simple as choosing a keyword phrase, optimizing your copy, submitting your site to a few directories, and moving on.

Search is now a major source of sales for many companies. It is only through due diligence, research, and customization of your SEO strategy that you will be successful. Not identifying your target audience and the intricacies of your niche early on can be costly for you – and your client.

If you still don’t believe me, consider this: no one ever bought a pizza by following links to a plumber’s website.


Reference URL:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/customize-seo-strategy-specific-niches-2/131662/

Friday, 13 March 2015

Google Webmaster Tools Now Shows When Images, CSS, or JavaScript Are Being Blocked




When Google crawls your site, ideally you want it to be able to see your site as a regular users would. If linked image, CSS, or JavaScript files are being blocked from crawling then Google is not able to properly render your site.

The problem with that is you’d likely never know when those files are being blocked and causing issues for your website. Google has announced that starting today, Webmaster Tools will include a Blocked Resources Report to help identify these types of issues.

The report is designed to first show you where the blocked resources are being hosted, then clicking on the host will reveal a drop down list of all the blocked resources along with the pages where they’re embedded. The report will also guide you through the steps you need to take to resolve the issues.

Curious why these files are so important? The updated Fetch and Render tool shows you why they matter. When you submit a URL to the tool it will show you how the page looks to a regular user compared to how it looks to Googlebot. If you have any blocked resources on your site, you will quickly see why they are so problematic.

If you have an abundance of blocked resources, Google recommends starting with the ones that will create the greatest visual difference when they become unblocked. Also keep in mind that in the blocked resources report, Google will only show you files from hosts that it believes you have some control over — meaning you won’t see files from hosts used by many different sites.

For more information on blocked resources, see Google’s Help Center article.

Friday, 27 February 2015

Twitter Now Has An Official WordPress Plugin, Here’s What It Does


Twitter just launched its very first official WordPress plugin, which combines several features previously available through third party apps such as the ability to embed tweets, and the ability to embed videos uploaded directly to Twitter.

If you’re thinking “Wait, doesn’t WordPress already have the ability to embed tweets?” - Yes, you’re absolutely right. The difference with this plugin is that you can now embed them and customize them to blend in with the rest of your site’s theme.

Using WordPress’s native ability to embed tweets you’re stuck with the default color scheme. With this new plugin you can customize backgrounds and font colors however you wish. In addition, embedded Twitter cards now include link previews.

Another benefit of using the official plugin is that as soon as Twitter implements a new feature it can also be added to the plugin. For example, Twitter recently added the ability to upload videos directly to its network, and this new plugin already supports the ability to embed tweets with video.

To take advantage of new Twitter features on WordPress you used to have to wait for the next major update to the CMS. Now you’ll be able to, in theory, start using new Twitter features on WordPress a lot sooner.

In addition to what I mentioned above, here are the other features that are currently available with the plugin:
  • Twitter Analytics: Track the popularity of your content as its shared across Twitter.
  • Tweet Button: A button for sharing your site’s content, automatically configured to include the URL of the post, site and author Twitter accounts, custom share text and hashtags.
  • Follow Button: A button for converting visitors into followers.
  • Twitter Advertising: Track actions on your site that were triggered by a Twitter ad, or use WordPress macros to build a custom targeting audience
You can download the official Twitter plugin on WordPress.org, or through the plugins downloader in the WordPress back end.

Resource URL:


http://www.searchenginejournal.com/twitter-now-official-wordpress-plugin-heres/127021/

Wednesday, 25 February 2015

This Month in #SocialMedia: Updates from January 2015




January was a heavy month in terms of social media updates, especially on Facebook. In case you missed any of the updates, here’s an overview:

Facebook

Simply titled ‘Work’, Facebook’s new product will reportedly allow businesses to create self-contained social networks exclusively for employees. The social networks created in Work would mirror Facebook in design and user experience. Users can join using their existing Facebook account, or can create their own ID just for use in Work.

Learn more: Facebook Introduces ‘Work’, A Social Tool For Businessess and Employees


Facebook announced its Q4 2014 earnings, revealing 1.39 billion users now use the social network every month, which marks a 13% year over year growth. Monthly active users on mobile grew even more at 26% year over year, now sitting at 1.19 billion in total.

Learn more: Facebook Reaches 1.39B Monthly Active Users, Half A Billion Are Mobile-Only

Facebook introduced a brand new feature for its iPhone app which should help people learn more about the places and attractions they’re visiting. Taking a page from Yelp and Foursquare, Facebook’s place tips will show you interesting facts about the location you’re at.

Learn more: Facebook To Show Location-Based Place Tips In Your News Feed

With a capability called ‘conversion lift measurement’, Facebook says it can help advertisers more accurately measure how much new business is being driven by ads. Measuring the amount of new business you’re actually getting from Facebook ads, especially offline, is about to get a lot easier.

Learn more: Facebook Introduces New Tool To Measure Sales Driven By Ads

Wit.ai, a Y combinator startup founded 18 months ago, has been acquired by Facebook with the intent for the company to help the social network create an API for building voice-controlled interfaces.

Learn more: Facebook Acquires Top Voice Recognition Startup, Speech Commands Coming?

Facebook is launching an update to its news feed algorithm designed to reduce the appearance of hoaxes. This includes scams, as well as deliberately false or misleading news.

Learn more: Facebook To Clean Up News Feed Spam By Showing Fewer Hoaxes

A new study by Searchmetrics reveals the top performing retail stores on Facebook during the holiday season. This was determined by analyzing likes, comments, and shares for pages from the websites of nine top US department stores and three mass merchant stores.

Learn more: Study Reveals Top Performing Retailers On Facebook During 2014 Holiday Season

Twitter

Twitter is partnering with Bing to provide users the ability for users to view tweets in multiple languages. Bing’s translation engine will make translated tweets a reality once again.

Learn more: Twitter Teams Up With Bing To Offer Translated Tweets

Twitter is introducing a new feature on everyone’s home timeline where you’ll be shown an overview of popular tweets you may have missed from accounts you follow.

Learn more: Twitter To Show Tweets You Missed ‘While You Were Away’

LinkedIn

LinkedIn reengineered its search engine to help users find what they’re looking for faster. The company claims that its new search engine, which is now available, can save its members more than a year of collective time spent searching.

Learn more: LinkedIn Revamps Its Search Engine For Speed And Relevance

Pinterest

When you’re a male on Pinterest, the search results can be a difficult place to navigate at times due to the fact that 71% of US visitors are women. Now, Pinterest search is getting smarter with enhancements to Guided Search that will allow you to filter search results by gender.

Learn more: Pinterest Search Gets Smarter, Delivers Results Based on Gender

Snapchat

Snapchat will be giving media publishers the ability to distribute short, edited clips of news and information. Content distributed via Discover will behave just like Snapchat’s Stories do — short clips arranged in sequence that will expire after 24 hours.

Learn more: Snapchat To Deliver Bite-Sized Pieces Of News And Entertainment From Media Publishers

Reddit

Two popular features that Reddit Gold users enjoy will now be available to all users. All Reddit users will now receive a notification when their account is linked to by another Reddit user, like when they’re mentioned in a thread or a post.

Learn more: Reddit Makes A Couple Of Premium Features Available To All Users

General Social Media

New data from Pew Research Internet Project finds that while Facebook is still the most popular social media site, Instagram is by far the fastest growing.

Learn more: Instagram The Fastest Growing Social Network, Facebook The Most Engaged, + More Stats

Social software company Shareaholic argues that the shift from search to social is here with the release of a new set of data that reveals social media referral traffic is up 22.71% from this time last year.

Learn more: Social Media Makes Up Nearly A Third Of All Referral Traffic, + More Stats

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg held a Q&A and discussed, among other topics, what he believes the future looks like for social networking. An audience member asked Zuckerberg what Facebook would look like in 10 years, to which he answered by speaking about three key trends he seeks happening in social media.

Learn more: Mark Zuckerberg On The Future Of Social Media, + More From Q&A

Resource URL:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/month-socialmedia-updates-january-2015/124926/

Monday, 23 February 2015

The Latest @Snapchat Update Makes It Easier For Brands to Grow Audiences



For Snapchat, it has been an uphill battle to help brands engage with their audience on the platform. One of the major issues for brands was trying to find their audience. Pulling followers from contact lists and invites seemed disingenuous, and didn’t seem worth it for the potential marketing value.
However, these new updates from Snapchat may help change everything.

Snapchat Introduces “Discover”
The new discover feature from Snapchat gives users a new way to discover and explore content and stories from different editorial teams. This new tool was collaboration between with various media leaders to help build a storytelling format that put “the narrative first”.
Snapchat says this tool is unique, “because it has been built for creatives. All too often, artists are forced to accommodate new technologies in order to distribute their work. This time we built the technology to serve the art: each edition includes full screen photos and videos, awesome long form layouts, and gorgeous advertising.”

The discover tool can be found by clicking the bottom right corner of your open screen that leads to contacts and then clicking the purple circle located in the top right corner of your contacts page.

Everyone Gets Their Own Ghost/QR Code
In addition to the “discover” feature, Snapchat released a new way to find followers. Every person on Snapchat now has his or her very own ghost. The ghost sits in the middle of a yellow box, which has several black dots. The dots are individual QR codes.

This means, that user can now take screenshots of their ghost, post it on social media and ask people to follow them. It also means that users can easily find brands on Snapchat and add them from anywhere their ghost is posted.

How does this work? A user simply points the camera at another person’s ghost and clicks on the white ghost in the middle of the screen. This will automatically add the user to their contact list.



Don’t Forget About “Snapcash
In late November of last year, Snapchat partnered with the payment processing app, Square to create Snapcash. Snapcash is integrated into the Square Cash Platform and allows users to connect their debit cards and send cash to other users. Once the debit information is connected to a Snapchat ID, users can send cash to other users by using their Snapchat ID. The user that was sent the money will receive an alert to their profile. If the user wants to accept the money, the user has to add their debit information to their Snapchat profile.

Considering that most of Snapchat’s users never log out of the system and it is now the fastest growing social media app, it could hold many opportunities for new ways of crowdfunding from a highly engaged and committed audience. Why haven’t we see much of it being done yet?

We haven’t seen Snapcash live up to its full potential yet, because when Snapcash initially launched brands had no real way of redirecting the user from the message to the Snapcash function. Now that Snapchat has launched Discover and QR codes to each user, a brand can easily redirect people from one platform to Snapchat and then to Snapcash. I see this as crowdfunding of the future.

What Does This Mean For the Future of Social Media Marketing?
It means we will now see these ghosts everywhere and by everywhere, I mean EVERYWHERE. If your brand is not using Snapchat, it’s time to start questioning why.

I believe Snapchat’s new changes not only uphold their company values, but they also make more room for advertisers to reach new audiences and to bring crowdfunding to an entirely new level. They have successfully created a platform that can be monetized without making users feel like they are being advertised to.

I hope to see Snapchat advertising become as valuable and important as Facebook or Twitter. There is real opportunity here for brands to reach a new audience of people in ways we have never seen before.

What do you think the future of Snapchat will be?

Image Credits
Featured Image: Pizzaman1996 via Wikipedia

All screenshots taken January 2015


Resource URL.

Sunday, 22 February 2015

Facebook Doesn’t Charge For Ads Unless A Real Person Sees Them

Today Facebook provided a rare glimpse into its philosophy for counting ad impressions, revealing that the company doesn’t believe ads should be charged for unless seen by a real person.

While it’s common practice for advertising industry groups to measure ‘served’ impressions, Facebook instead measures ‘viewed’ impressions.

Here’s the difference between served and viewed impressions:


  • Served impressions: As long as an ad renders somewhere on the pages it’s counted as an impression, even if the ad ends up somewhere on a page that a user never sees, like below the fold.
  • Viewed impressions: It only counts as an impressions if the ad ends up being displayed on a user’s screen.

Facebook explains why it counts viewed vs. served ad impressions:

“At Facebook, we agree that viewed impressions are a better way to measure ad delivery. The reason is simple: if an ad is viewed it has a greater chance to drive value for an advertiser. That’s why we use viewed impressions to measure ad delivery across desktop and mobile.”

The company goes on to explain that an ad is considered viewed the second it’s displayed on a desktop or mobile screen. If an ad is technically served, but not viewed, it’s not counted. Those same conditions will soon apply to organic content posted by businesses.

While measuring viewed impressions is an improvement over measuring served impressions, it’s still not perfect. For example, just because an ad is on a user’s screen doesn’t necessarily mean it’s getting viewed.

Anyone who uses Facebook regularly can attest to the fact that numerous ads get scrolled over each day, so there are still many ads being charged for that are getting ignored.

However, it can still be argued that this is a better approach than charging for ads that are never seen at all. The company adds, “Our research shows that value is created as soon as ads are seen by people, even if only a portion of the ad was seen for a brief period of time,”

Matt Southern

Matt Southern

Freelance Writer at MattSouthern.com

Resource URL: