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A former Google engineer is leading a team of two dozen Facebook engineers dedicated to creating an improved Facebook search engine that will make it easier for users to more easily find shared or liked articles, videos, and status updates, Bloomberg reported.

This doesn’t sound like Facebook’s attempt to become a traditional information retrieval type of web search engine like Google or Bing, which both crawl and show results for the entire web based on hundreds or thousands of signals and ranking factors. Rather, it seems like this is more a case of Facebook trying to provide better search results within the social network’s walls based on its big data – relationships, locations, Likes, subscriptions, images, and so on. Besides, Facebook just doesn’t have the engineers on the payroll to create a full-on Google competitor.

In February, Facebook searches numbered 336 million, trailing all of the “big five” search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, AOL), while sites like eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon saw more search queries than Facebook, according to comScore data, despite Facebook having more than 800 million users. Facebook search currently allows you to filter searches by people, pages, places, groups, apps, events, music, web results, posts by friends, public posts, and posts in groups.

Bing remains Facebook’s provider of web search results. Since 2010, Bing has personalized its search results by incorporating Facebook Like data into Bing’s algorithm.

But perhaps this could be a step toward a future social search engine that Facebook could monetize with pay-per-click ads and become a player in what is forecast to be a $19+ billion industry this year. Though Google and Facebook both have different ad models, data suggests that social ads work for both companies, improving ad recall and click-through rates.

The Facebook search engine project is headed by Lars Rasmussen, who jumped from Google to Facebook in 2010. Of social and search, Rasmussen – who helped create Google Maps and the failed Google Wave project – said at the time:

“I do think that social is a significantly less explored area still than search and it is sort of the frontier of technology in many ways. But that doesn’t mean in any way that search is obsolete or even close to being obsolete. We are all going to be using search many, many times a day every day of our lives, forever.”

In the past year, Google has attempted to get its hands on more valuable user data by introducing +1 button and Google+, in addition to adding personalized searches with Search Plus Your World.

SES Toronto 2012 is June 11-13. Register before May 11 and save up to $300!

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2165515/Facebook-Search-Engine-Overhaul-in-Works

In a search marketing environment where linking is all the rage, we tend to forget that just as important are the links we maintain internally on our sites. What is the point of garnering a great inbound link profile if your site can hardly be traversed by a search engine or human visitor?

The problem with the world of linking is that we place too much time thinking externally. I, like many, ponder nofollow, follow, paid, non-paid, or who Google is threatening to penalize. But at the end of the day did we provide pathways (links) throughout our site for our content to be viewed from the masses we attained through a great inbound link profile? Probably not.

Internal linking is one of the easiest elements in SEO. Why? Because typically SEO has to pick a ratio of appeasing a user but also a search engine.

With internal linking, the better you do, you equally benefit the human element but also the crawling bot. So, let’s start making everyone happy.

For those of you well-versed in SEO, this is just a refresher as to what you probably have lost track of while worrying about inbound links, who the next JCPenney will be, or when you will reach your desired Domain Authority/Page Authority/PageRank and so on.

Making Search Engines Happy

• Have sitemaps: One of the oldest rules of SEO is to have a sitemap containing at least all top level pages linked from each page of your site. Follow this up with probably the second oldest rule of SEO: you should have an XML sitemap containing all URLs on the site. The may not seem like internal linking, but this actually is, in its rawest form.
• How do you link site-wide in navigation? You might be surprised to find out you are not linking to absolute URLs throughout the site. A few examples include non-www. versions of site pages as well as duplicate index pages.
• Does your navigational structure or on-page link structure lean on image links or Javascript linking? Navigational linking should be textual or CSS based and you should remember to mind text in your on-page linking versus a reliance on image linking.
• When linking with text, it should anchor on a relevant set of terms regarding the linked page. It doesn’t always have to be just a keyword phrase, but make sure it’s never simply “click here.” Support your content with these links and do so in a fashion that features relevant topical content across the site being linked page to the main page for the given topic. You want to show the search engines that you’re an authority for a given topic, you have a lot of content pertaining to it, and all this content points back to one main topical page.

Making People Happy

You’ve worked hard to get them here, now what? I usually take the task of internal linking for the user and parse into three steps.

• You must use the four types of navigational linking, main, footer, breadcrumb, and secondary/supplemental. These should include links to the most important top level folders/categories on the site and a link back to the home page. Ensure that the main and footer navigation remains consistent across all site pages. Don’t overinflate the main navigation with links and endless dropdowns as you are only confusing a user and overinflating your site-wide overall internal link count. With this in mind, review your Google Webmaster Tools account within the Internal Links section. Before you get there imagine what you would like to see as the top five most linked page on your site. What did you find? You might be surprised to find that, yes, the homepage is linked the most followed by Privacy Policy and Terms of Use as this is all you are using in your site footer navigation.
• Link from your copy. This one is so simple, but is often overlooked. Link to supporting content on your site. You could even link to another site – only if it is opening in another window. Think of it this way if you were stating a case or trying to persuade someone, wouldn’t you want to provide supporting information to substantiate your statement? Internal linking within the copy helps show that you’re the authority for black fuzzy widgets because you have supporting articles, how-tos, FAQs, and a case study on them.
• Calls to action, what do you want people to do? Is this present above the fold of each page? Do you want visitors to call, click, submit a form, buy something, see the latest deal? Don’t just provide a call to action once someone gets deeper into the site. If there is a mission to your site express what that and make this apparent throughout the site. Too often I see that someone intends to have users commit a certain action yet I don’t see the available opportunity for them to do so. Call to action reinforcement reminds me of a great presentation once given by Bryan Eisenberg on “Maintaining Scent.” Your messaging, design and in this case your internal linking must have consistency to help lead someone through your site into a conversion.

Now That Everyone is Happy

Paying heed to the points above regarding search engine linking needs ensures that you’re doing your part to establish full site indexation and access to site pages. You’re also giving a search engine spider a sense of which content on your site is the most important via the directional relationship of linked pages.

For users, a well internally-linked site is going to let a user know where they are on the site, where they should go, and what they should do.

You’ve probably done a great job with inbound linking and other facets of SEO. However, now that the traffic has arrived, it’s no time to quit when the finish line is within sight.

SES Toronto 2012 is June 11-13. Register before May 11 and save up to $300!

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2165167/Internal-Linking-the-Other-Linking

There are no safe link building shortcuts. Instead I want to warn marketers about deceptive search marketers and the dangers of using “easy” link building tactics. In the latest instance, the search engine optimization community is abuzz with news that Home Depot’s SEO team has attempted to increase its link portfolio by potentially shady means. Last year, J.C. Penney and even Google’s own Chrome browser marketing site were reportedly penalized by Google Search for violating linking guidelines.

The temptation to manipulate rankings by acquiring links through unethical means is easy to understand: Links are the lifeblood of the Internet and a major factor in every major search engine’s ranking algorithms. In theory, more links means better rankings. In reality, the engines compile data across hundreds of factors algorithmically to determine rankings, and links are just one part. We’ll look at some link building tactics as examples of what not to do.

Know the Linking Guidelines

The first and easiest way to run afoul of linking guidelines is ignorance. Google in particular publishes its webmaster guidelines as a way to communicate what it considers ethical and unethical in its search algorithms. Google’s guidelines for links are very clear:

“Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (‘Link to me and I’ll link to you.’)
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank”

The guidelines are fairly broad. In practice, I use this check: If a linking opportunity seems too easy it’s probably in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines. For example, many companies will offer to sell you 100 links for the low price of $50. Yes, these companies will sell you the links and they may even produce the links. However, the tactics they use will involve activities like comment spam, link exchanges, and carbon copy posts that link back to your site from across a network of self-owned blogs. Emails that include link building and price without a strategic content or relationship aspect should be deleted immediately.

Home Depot’s Example

In the Home Depot example, its SEO team took an ethical link building tactic — requesting that vendors or partners link to a relevant page on your site — and twisted it to make it potentially unethical and certainly misleading. The request for links stated two things:

• “Linking to The Home Depot website will benefit our business partners by increasing the page authority of your website.” This statement is absolutely untrue. Home Depot will benefit from the link, but the business partners will not. The link won’t hurt business partners’ SEO efforts, but it won’t help them either.
• “Please note that the hyperlink does not have to be visually indicated.” Some SEO professionals have interpreted this to mean that hidden links are fine with Home Depot, such as a displaying the text of the link in white on a white background. However, I think it’s more likely that the requestor is stating that the link does not have to be blue and underlined. It could, for instance, not be underlined at all and be displayed in the same color as regular body text. There’s nothing unethical about that, many sites change the color and style of their hyperlinks.

The lesson to learn from Home Depot’s story is that emailed link requests are very easily forwarded to SEO professionals or media who are likely to make a story of it. If you do email a request for links, be absolutely certain that the request is factually correct and follows webmaster guidelines for linking to the letter. Anything that can be misconstrued probably will be.

Buying Links Is Very Risky

Finally, let’s talk about J.C. Penney’s snafu. Last year The New York Times ran an exposé on J.C. Penney’s strangely high rankings across a wide variety of highly competitive terms and uncovered paid links in the site’s link portfolio. As a result, Google issued a penalty after a human review. J.C. Penney disappeared from Google’s search rankings for three months while they cleaned up their paid link activity.

Google has stated clearly that buying and selling links for financial gain or in exchange for products constitutes an attempt to manipulate rankings and can be punished by lowering the site’s rankings or removing them entirely. In a Webmaster Tools post, Google stated, “Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such as excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank.” Google takes paid links so seriously that it even has a form set up for citizens of the web to report sites they suspect of buying or selling links.

These are just a few ways to run afoul for search engines’ linking guidelines for webmasters. When in doubt, ask a seasoned SEO professional or head to the Google Webmaster Forums to ask if an offer you’ve received is legitimate and ethical.

Read More

• J.C. Penney Incurs Google SEO ‘Action’; How to Protect Your Own Company
• SEO Case Study: When Past SEO Efforts Hurt Today’s Traffic

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Article source: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/3489-SEO-Avoid-Link-Building-Shortcuts

Where do you start the analysis process when you detect an issue with your PPC account? How do you determine the root cause of a performance downturn? Answering these questions incorrectly could you lead down a rabbit hole of aimless stats that provide no real solutions.

Once you have established a hypothesis on what has happened to performance, then you need to dig into the stats. Diving straight into the minutia (such as keyword level data) can cause confusion, slow down your ability identify the issue, and cause you to miss other (more important) issues within the account.

Analysis prioritization is critical when diagnosing an ailing account. Knowing where to look within an account for optimization opportunities is just as important as knowing what to do when these opportunities are discovered.

Start at the Top

Initiate your analysis at the highest level of your account. Normally this means at the campaign level. For example, if your CPA is over goal, then you need to concentrate on the campaign that is hindering your performance most.

You should focus on the campaign with the most volume that is providing the weakest returns. Optimizing a campaign with a high CPA that only generates 3 percent of your volume isn’t going to influence your account, but focusing the campaign that produces 24 percent of your volume makes more sense.

Work your way down from the campaign level, into ad groups, ad texts, keywords (for search network campaigns) and placements (for display network campaigns).

Review the Trending

Don’t base your analysis on a handful of clicks or conversions. Any campaign/ad group/keyword can have a bad day or even a bad week. There can be external factors that influence performance such as seasonal cycles or shifts in the competitive landscape. Determine if the lagging performance looks temporary or if it’s indicative of a bigger problem.

Run a trending report to determine if this campaign/ad group/keyword has a declining performance. To get a snapshot you should look at stats at least two weeks before performance started to suffer.

Extend your analysis out by a month or two to get a more complete view of the trending. You may find that the performance of this particular campaign/ad group has actually been declining gradually.

Determine the Root Cause

As you conduct the trending analysis, you should also be looking for evidence indicating what has caused the issue.

For example, I was analyzing a Display Network campaign within Google AdWords recently. Our overall CPA had increased and I was trying to determine the root cause. During my reporting timeframe (two months) our impressions/clicks had remained steady, CTR hadn’t changed much and our conversion rate had fluctuated only marginally. The root cause was our CPC. It had been rising incrementally over the previous three weeks and this was causing our CPA to suffer. When I started my analysis, I was certain that my conversion rate had decreased – and I was incorrect.

Upon further investigation there were a couple of websites within our GDN distribution that had elevated CPCs. We removed those websites from our general, keyword-targeted distribution and targeted them individually with specific (lowered) bids.

Focus on the Most Impactful Changes

After conducting the trend analysis and determining what the issue’s root cause should be, you need to create a plan-of-action. Focus on the changes that will directly influence the root cause.

For example, if low CTR appears to be the underlying issue but your average position is higher than three, increasing bids isn’t going get you anywhere. To address this issue you may need to look at testing new ads, keyword segmentation, and negative keywords.

Monitor Campaign Changes

Don’t make changes within a campaign and think your work is done. Actually, it’s just beginning. You need to monitor the campaign in order make sure that the proper changes were implemented and performance is trending in the right direction.

If performance doesn’t improve, you may have made drawn the wrong conclusions; made the wrong changes; or the alterations may not have been strong enough.

Optimization efforts shouldn’t be made on the fly. A plan to analyze performance, understand stats within context, and make changes that will impact specific issues should be part of your ongoing campaign management.

SES New York 2012 is this week (March 19-23). Register today and join Vivastream – the new SES social platform! Find out “How to Make Friends Influence People at #SESNY.”

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2161612/How-to-Prioritize-Your-PPC-Analysis-for-Awesome-Results

Do you see photos on Facebook that you know someone else took and you have no idea who they beleong to?

One of the nicest things anyone can do for a photographer that has taken their time, their expensive equipment, and their training to capture and or create a photograph and post it on Facebook is :

1. To compliment them – we live for that…
2. Ask to buy photos – Makes us really happy!
3. Ask permission to use their photos – which shows respect from our friends that we have selected on Facebook.
4. Use the “share” photo option instead of downloading the photo and posting it as your own. This leaves the photo ownership and recognition.
5. If you use a photo from another Facebook “friend” – it would be nice to show some form of recognition, a simple “Thanks to the photographer” that took the photograph – a simple common courtesy.

Just wanted to pass this on to all my Facebook friends to continue to enjoy all the fantastic photography and images being shared with everyone.

Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another addition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’ve been hearing a lot of chatter in the SEO blogosphere and on Twitter and on the forums about this new potential Google penalty that’s coming down the line around over-optimization. Now, one of Google’s representatives mentioned at a conference, South by Southwest, down in Austin, Texas, about a month ago actually, that Google would be looking into penalizing over-optimized websites and folks who have engaged in over-
the-top SEO.

There’s been a lot of speculation around when that’s coming out, whether that’s coming out. There are a few things happening, actually, this week and last night about, “Hey is this already something we’re seeing?” Seer Interactive, right, Wil Reynolds’ fantastic SEO company out of Philadelphia had this penalty, and people were wondering whether that was related to this. Not really sure.

But before this penalty hits, for goodness sake, SEO folks, let’s make these changes to our websites because we could be in real trouble if we don’t impact these things beforehand. I think these are some of the most likely candidates to be hit by Google’s over-optimization penalty, some of the most likely patterns they’re going to try and match against in this upcoming change. So let’s talk through them.

Number one, your titles need to be authentic. They need to sound real. They need to sound like a human being wrote them that was not intending necessarily simply to rank for phrase after phrase. I’ll give you a good example. Bad: web design services, web design firm space brand name, whatever your brand name is, web design. What does it sound like? It sounds like all you’re trying to do is rank for keywords, not show off your brand name, especially if this is your home page or those kinds of things. You’re repeating keywords three times. Web design is in this title three times. Think about whether a normal human being would read that title and think, oh yeah, that sounds legitimate. No, they’d think to themselves there’s something fishy here, something spammy, something’s wrong, something manipulative. Try instead, probably equally effective, if not more, brand name web design Portland Spiffiest Design Services. Now look, I’ve got the word “design services,” which you wanted to get in here. I’ve got the city where you are that you’re trying to target, got brand name web design, right, sort of branding myself as the product and the keyword. Much, much better.

Try and look through your sites and see if this is a potential issue. I’ve seen tons of sites where SEO folks have just gone overboard again and again. Don’t get me wrong. I used to do this too. One of the crappiest things about this is, even if your rank, your click through rates go down. So you can rank in position two or three and be getting less than the people below you, because people don’t think that these are legitimate titles and they perceive them to be manipulative, especially if you’re targeting more higher end, savvy or sophisticated technology customers.

Number two, manipulative internal links. I see this a lot on side bars, inside of content, where people have taken all of the instances of a particular word or repeated it throughout the side bar or in the footer, those kinds of things, and are pointing with exact match anchors to the same page over and over again. Now, we all know as SEOs that the first anchor text link counts and only one on the page is going to pass that value. Linking repeatedly to the same page with the same anchor is not helpful for SEO, and it makes our sites look really spammy and manipulative and questionable to someone who’s browsing it. Why would we want to hurt our conversion rates like this, and why would we want to point out to the engines that, hey, over here, I’m trying to manipulate you? What are you thinking? This is crazy.

Instead, go with logical, useful, change it up when you’re linking to pages, maybe a couple of times, in some spaces. You have a blog post and it mentions a page on your site that you want people to actually go to and that you think is useful in context. Great, link over there. Fine, use the anchor text. Maybe use a modified version of the anchor text, a little longer, a little shorter, a little more natural sounding, and you’re going to get these same results, but you’re going to do it in a much more effective way. You’re not going to be at risk of whatever is happening with this over-optimization penalty.

Number three, cruddy, link filled footers. I see this all the time still. You’re just having a bunch of exact anchor links down in here that no one would actually really click and that come in lists. I often see them in light gray on light gray so that it’s not particularly easy to read. Use your footer wisely. Use your footer to link to the things that people expect to find in the footer. If you really need to get anchor text on pages, find natural ways to put it in the real menu at the top, in the content itself. Don’t be trying to mess around and throw footer links site wide, across things. This 2002, man. We’re ten years later. It’s like at least a decade past that.

Number four, text content blocks built primarily for the engines. You know how sometimes you get to a page and there’s good content, usable stuff, an image, a call to action, and then weirdly there’s this block of junk. It’s this block of blah, blah, keyword, keyword, blah, blah, blah, keyword, keyword, blah, blah, blah. Why is that there? Why does that exist? Does that really work? Does that really trick the engines? Yeah, it tricks them into thinking that they should penalize you. Get that out of there. Rewrite that stuff, man. Seriously, this is going to cost you far more than it’s going to help you. If you’ve got those spammy blocks of text in your pages, that have no purpose other than to get your keywords or some keyword into the text, and it’s not actually helping anyone, it’s not a good call to action, it’s not helping your conversion rate, it will actually drive people away from you. Why are you trying to rank if not to get people to do good things on your site, and like your brand, and appreciate you and come back again and again, and tell their friends, and share it socially, and link to you? Don’t be putting this stuff in here. This is dangerous for all of those reasons, and super dangerous given this over-optimization penalty that’s potentially coming down the line.

Number five, back links from penalty likely sources. So this is one of the toughest ones because it’s really hard to control if you’ve already gotten links from these places. But you can see with those 700,000 Google webmaster tools, pings that they sent everybody that said, hey, it looks like you’ve done some manipulative linking, and that kind of thing. Be really careful for all of these, link networks, anything that says private link network, or I have a link network and I’ll place your site on it, or building up a network of sites that you then interlink to one and other. Come on. There are so many better ways to get links. You’re putting a lot of time and effort and energy into building all of that stuff. You can do so many authentic things with that time. This is time terribly spent. Comment spam, especially those that are sent though automated software blasts, so you think of your XRumer or your SENuke, the article marking robot, or whatever, that’s going to submit your site to tons of places or find open holes in the web where they can leave comments and link spam and that kind of stuff. Forum signature links, this is actually one where I suspect it’s one of the places where Google really gets to know, hey, this guy clearly is a manipulative, black hat/gray hat SEO, because look, they’re pointing to the same site where we found all the link spam from forum signatures, particularly on webmaster sorts of boards. That clearly indicates that’s their site and their trying to rain for it, and all that kind of stuff. They’ve got a long profile, and they keep linking to all these things from their forum signatures. Just be very cautious about this. I’m not saying don’t link to it, but maybe don’t use your exact match anchor text or try to make it more of a branding play, try and make it more authentic feeling. Certainly participating in communities is a great thing. Just watch that.

Reciprocal lists, right, people are emailing each other back and forth and saying, “Hey, I’ll put you on my list of links. You put me on yours. Oh, and we’ll do it 20 times and we’ll form this big reciprocal circus that’s going to get all of us penalized.” How great is that?

Article marking sites, I’ve talked about article marketing in the past. Generally when you see, hey, we’re an article marketing site and we can help you rank higher, and submit your content to us and we’ll link out, and the same is true for SEO focused directories, anytime you see a site that is essentially extolling the virtues of participating there, or contributing there, as being primarily related to the link and the anchor text and the page rank you’re going to get, you can bet your sweet hiney that Google does not want to count that. That’s exactly what they’re trying to prevent, and I’d worry, whether it’s this penalty or a penalty that Google makes in the future, that this is the kind of stuff that gets hit.

Last one, number six, large amounts of pages that are targeting very similar, kind of modified versions of keywords and keyword intents, with only slight variations, slight variation being the key here. So think:
used cars Seattle, used autos Seattle, pre-owned cars Seattle. Why are those three different pages? It sort of feels like keywordy, SEO-y, spam, right, and then there are pointing exact match anchors at all of these. This is the same page. You can target all three of these keywords very nicely on one page that’s called Used and Pre-owned Cars/Autos in Seattle. Right, one page, good, you’ve got it. You’ve combined all of the things. You want to have that great user experience there. You don’t want to have to build that three times. You’re not trying to build a bunch of spammy anchor texts to each one that’s pointing from each of the different ones. The used cars Seattle page has a link to the used auto Seattle’s, it’s sort of like, “What?” From a user perspective, “Why is that there? What is the difference between a car and an automobile exactly? I don’t understand why these two exist.” This kind of thing is something where I think it’s a very clear pattern match that the engines can detect. Looks like they did some research and then just built a page for everything, and then they pointed links at all of them. Its manipulative, right. This is the kind of thing, also, that will get you in trouble.

So, one, one, two, three, four, five, six. Six things you should change, and even though I’m not the Count from Sesame Street, you should still pay careful attention to these, because I’m super nervous that when this penalty going to come out, there are just going to be so many webmasters and SEOs who are doing this kind of stuff, and I don’t know which one Google’s going to hit on this time and what they might hit on in the future. But I just want you to be okay. I want your sites to do well, and this is such bad stuff for user experience too. So please avoid it. Be careful. Good luck to you, and we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/U0mG3CIiWck/6-changes-every-seo-should-make-before-the-over-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday

Since the days of Google Buzz, the +1 button has been a mystery to users and content producers alike. It’s different from Facebook’s “Like” button, in that it doesn’t directly share content to a user’s social stream. But the cultivation of a social graph has long been the goal of Google, and its connection to search was likely inevitable.

Google defines the +1 as a feature to help people discover and share relevant content from the people they already know and trust. Users can +1 different types of content, including Google search results, websites, and advertisements. Once users +1 a piece of content, it can be seen on the +1 tab in their Google+ profile, in Google search results, and on websites with a +1 button.

The plot thickened last month when Google launched Search plus Your World. Jack Menzel, director of product management for Google Search, explained that now Google+ users would be able to “search across information that is private and only shared to you, not just the public web.” According to Ian Lurie from the blog Conversation Marketing, in Search plus Your World, search results that received a lot of +1s tend to show up higher in results.

Google has come out and described the purpose of a +1, but hasn’t necessarily explained the direct effect a +1 has on search ranking. Here’s a breakdown of what we currently know.

Does a +1 Affect my Site’s Performance in Social Search?

The +1 has an indirect effect on your site’s search rank. This does not mean the more +1’s a link has, the higher rank it achieves in traditional search results. Take this scenario:

When a Google+ user +1’s a piece of content, he gives it his “stamp of approval.” Then, say one of his connections from Google+ searches for the same or related topic. Because of Search plus Your World, his friend is more likely to click on the same link the original user +1’d (when a signed-in user searches, his Google results may include snippets annotated with the names of connections who have +1′d the content). This is because content recommended by friends and acquaintances is often more relevant than content from strangers, according to Google.

This is also true for users who are not signed in to their Google account when they search. When a user searches for the same phrase, the results might display the total number of +1’s a link has received, which is another validation that it’s a relevant link.

How Does This Relate to SEO?

Since the +1′d link has a chance at a higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR), there is a greater potential the link will be shared, whether it be on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or any social network. An experiment by Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz, tested the relationship between Twitter and Facebook shares and search results in Google. He found a positive correlation between the number of retweets and shares a link received and its search ranking. This means, the more the link was passed around on Twitter and Facebook, the higher the search rank of the page. This in turn led to better SEO.

What’s the Take-Away?

A Google +1 can indirectly lead to a better page rank. A greater number of +1’s increases a link’s potential for a high CTR, which could lead to increased social sharing, and in turn can increase its Google search rank. What’s important to note here is the correlation, not causation, between +1′s, other social shares, and search rank.

The bottom line is, the SEO effects of a +1 are very indirect, which means traditional SEO practices should not be ignored. SEO methods such as link building, relevant keywords, and URL structure have a more significant impact on page ranking.

The Google +1 feature is still in its infancy of course, and more data needs to be gathered to draw a statistical correlation to search. As Google said, “For +1′s, as with any new ranking signal, we are starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality.”

SEO experts, such as Erin Everhart from 352 Media Group, have a positive outlook on the future of social search. She says, “I don’t think we live in a world, nor will we ever live in a world, where any social cue doesn’t have influence over SEO.”

Are you seeing the effects of Google +1 on your SEO? Will the +1 eventually have a direct effect on search rank? Share your experiences in the comments.

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Article source: http://mashable.com/2012/02/21/google-plus-1-seo/

Google’s head spam cop Matt Cutts announced the impending launch of a new over-optimization penalty to “level the playing ground.” The disclosure came earlier this month at the South By Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas during an open panel — entitled “Dear Google Bing: Help Me Rank Better!” — with Google’s and Bing’s webmaster and web spam representatives. Google’s goal for the penalty is to give sites that have produced great content a better chance to rank and drive organic search traffic and conversions.

Pretty much all site owners can point to the search results for their dearest trophy phrase and point out at least one site that just shouldn’t be allowed to rank. Competitive ire aside, sometimes sites that have poor content but focus extra hard on their search engine optimization efforts. These sites are easy to spot. They usually have a keyword domain, lots of keyword-rich internal linking, and heavily optimized title tags and body content. Their link portfolios will be heavily optimized as well. But their content is weak, their value proposition is low, they’re obviously — to human observers — only ranking because of their SEO. The upcoming over-optimization penalty would theoretically change the playing field so that sites with great content and higher user value rank above sites with excessive SEO.

What Qualifies as Over-Optimization?

No one but Google knows what, exactly, is “over-optimization.” However, Cutts did mention that Google is looking at sites by “people who sort of abuse it whether they throw too many keywords on the page, or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they’re doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area.” It’s widely believed that keyword stuffing and link exchanges are already spam signals in Google’s algorithm, so either Google intends to ratchet up the amount of penalty or dampening that those spam signals merit algorithmically or they have new over-optimization signals in mind as well.

5 Signals that Should Qualify as Over-Optimization

Because I can’t believe that the bits Cutts references are all there is to the over-optimization algorithm update, I’ve been daydreaming about what I would classify as over-optimization. Keep in mind that I have no inside knowledge as to what they’re planning. In other words, don’t run out and change all these things just because you read this article. But these tactics are on my list because they leave a bad taste in my mouth when I come across them and I sure hope they’re on Cutts’ list as well.

• Linking to a page from that same page with optimized anchor text. If the page is www.jillsfakesite.com/flannel-shirts, and in the body copy of that page I link the words “flannel shirts” to the same page the words are on, IE www.jillsfakesite.com/flannel-shirts, that should count as over-optimization.
• Linking repeatedly from body copy to a handful of key pages with optimized anchor text. If 33 of my 100 pages link to www.jillsfakesite.com from the body copy with the anchor text “Jills Fake Site,” that should count as over-optimization.
• Changing the “Home” anchor text to your most valuable keyword. Usually the home link is the site’s logo. But in the cases where the home link is textual and has been optimized with the juiciest keyword, that should count as over-optimization.
• Overly consistent and highly optimized anchor text on backlinks. If 10 of the 100 links to a page contain the same highly optimized anchor text, such as “Jill’s Fake Site, the Fakest Site Selling Flannel Shirts on the Web,” that should count as over-optimization.
• Generic keyword domain name. They have way too much impact on rankings, and need to be demoted in importance. Now I’m sure it’s difficult to determine which words are generic and which are brands. But Google seems to have cracked that nut at least partially with its related brands results. Surely they must be close to understanding the difference between the non-branded domain littleblackdress.com and the brand whitehouseblackmarket.com.

So there you have it, my five least favorite over-optimization tactics, all of which I hope become algorithmic spam signals. Cutts’ transcribed comments on the penalty are below, but it’s worth going to the “Dear Google Bing: Help Me Rank Better!” session page to listen to the entire recording. You’ll find the transcribed tidbit 16:09 into the hour-long audio clip.

According to Matt Cutts, “Normally we don’t preannounce changes, but there is something we’ve been working on in the last few months and hopefully in the next couple of months or so, you know, in the coming weeks, we hope to release it. And the idea basically is to try to level the playing ground a little bit. So all of those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, over-optimization or overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little bit more level. And so that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the website, the Googlebot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive so that if people don’t do SEO we handle that, and then we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it whether they throw too many keywords on the page, or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they’re doing to sort go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area. And so that is something where we continue to pay attention and we continue to work on it, and it is an active area where we’ve got several engineers on my team working on that right now.”

Read More

• Too Much SEO Can Harm an Ecommerce Business

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Article source: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/3440-Google-Plans-SEO-Over-Optimization-Penalty

Do you know what is the most common question that I get every day on social media, forums or email?

“How to get insights about my Google Analytics data?” People approach me saying that they have a Google Analytics account for years, but they look only at page views or the number of visitors they get.

And this is wrong, this is so wrong when they have powerful free Web Analytics tools that they can leverage to learn more about their visitors and use those insights to better serve their visitors.

That is why in this article I am going to tell you some Google Analytics tricks that you should use for your website.

You can get the basics from my Google Analytics course, but right now I am going to take this one step further to help you get even more insights from Google Analytics.

Now, if you don’t use the latest version of Google Analytics, login into your account and click the [New Version] link from the top right corner of your screen before we get started.

This way I can be sure that you use the latest Google Analytics interface and you can follow this article along.

1. Setup Goals

Something that it’s quite a straight forward process, it’s actually neglected by the majority of people and this is the fact that after you install the tracking code on your website you need to setup goals.

The goals you setup for your website are the foundation of your website analysis because everything gravitates around your goals and conversion rates, the goals that are ultimately your business goals.

If you are wondering what goals you need to setup, start by asking yourself what is the purpose of your website. Is it an eCommerce site and you want to sells tangible goods, is it a blog where you want to make revenue from ads, do you sell eBooks or services? What is the main purpose of your site?

Then, once you figure this out you can go and start setting up goals base on your business objectives.

If this is still unclear for you, here are some examples that will give you traction:

• eCommerce site – enable eCommerce tracking and start checking the conversion rates for your products
• Engaged Visitors – people who spend more than one minute on your site
• Readers – people who visit at least two pages on your site
• Calls to action – use event tracking (see below in the article) to measure calls to action
• Best performing ads – again, use event tracking to measure your best performing ads
• Subscriptions – check how the visitors who subscribe to your list behave
• Purchases – if you sell eBooks or courses you can get insights about your buyers

Later, these goals will help you track conversion rates and get insights about what are the main traffic sources that send you visitors which convert, what are the keywords who send you customers, which page your visitor use most to signup for your newsletter, where are your customers from and examples can continue.

Use these examples to get started, but please note that every website is unique and it will have unique goals.

2. Connect your Google Webmaster Tools account

Google Webmaster Tools is another free product from Google which helps you see data about your website such as the number of impressions for your search queries and their position in Google, the number of links to your site or diagnosis information reported by Google after crawling your website.

Additionally, you can check +1 metrics, your site performance or submit a sitemap for Google to index.

But what the really interesting thing is the fact that you can connect your Google Webmaster Tools account with your Google Analytics account and get access to the new Search Engine Optimization reports.

Once you do that, you will be able to see three new reports in your Google Analytics account: Queries, Landing Pages and Geographical Summary. They will help you learn more about your top performing search queries (keywords) and landing pages.

Then, you can use that data to identify:

• Keywords with a low click through rate, but a good average position. Once you know them, you can change the meta title and description of your page to improve their click through rate.
• Landing pages with a good click through rate, but a low average position. These pages can be easily run through an on-page optimization process that will improve their rankings.
• What are the countries of your organic visitors and who your target market is.

To connect your site from Google Webmaster Tools in Google Analytics, go to the [Traffic Sources] section, select [Search Engine Optimization] and then one of the three reports.

At this stage you will see a page with the benefits of linking your accounts and a button where it says [Set up Webmaster Tools data sharing]. Click that button and then click [Edit] from the [Webmaster Tools Settings].

Then, you will be redirected to your Google Webmaster Tools where you can connect it with Google Analytics.

3. Enable Site Speed

Site speed is also a neat feature of Google Analytics that lets you see the load time of your pages. This will help you check what pages need your attention and determine you to look for ways of speeding up the load time of your pages.

If you wonder why this is important, I can tell you that the load speed of your pages can significantly improve your visitors experience on your site and it’s also a ranking factor in Google.

So a good load speed can make your visitors happy and can also increase your rankings.

Along with the number of Page Views and Bounce Rate, you can see the Average Page Load Time (in seconds) and the number of visits that have been used as a sample for every page on your website.

Additionally, if you click on the [Performance] tab, you can check different buckets of your page load time and see what is the average load speed of your pages.

The [Map Overlay] will show you what is the load speed for different countries or territories.

If before you needed to add an additional code to your Google Analytics tracking, now that is no longer required and Google Analytics will automatically add data to your reports.

4. Enable Site Search

It’s a fact that visitors who use the search box on your site are more likely to convert than the ones who don’t. The reason why this happens is because they are more engaged with your website, with your content or your products and services.

The beautiful thing about site search is that it lets you discover the exact keywords that people use to search for your products, so you can take this a step further and use them in your search engine optimization campaigns.

You can actually use the most important keywords that people use to search on your site to optimize your pages and drive more targeted traffic to your website.

Additionally, they might look for products or services that you do not have on your offer, but you can add them with little effort and increase your sales.

Or if you have a blog, site search is a great way to see what your readers are looking for and get a ton of article ideas out of them.

If you would like to enable site search on your website, first make sure that you have a search form on your site and then enable Site Search in Google Analytics.

5. Track Events

Event tracking is a powerful feature in Google Analytics that can help you track among others:

• How many people download your eBook
• What ads are performing better and who clicks on your ads
• Which signup form converts better (sidebar, below the post, about page)
• Who pauses, fast forward or stops a video
• What errors a visitor encounters during the checkout

But that is not all. Using the latest version of Google Analytics, you are also able to set these events as goals which can help you see the performance of your events based on different metrics.

Enabling event tracking it’s not a hard process. All you have to do is just add the code below next to your URL, before you replace the default values.

onclick=”_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'category', 'action', 'opt_label', 'opt_value']);”

These default values will help you identify your events and here’s what they represent:

• Category – You can use this element to identify what you want to track: eBook, video, signup form, ads.
• Action – This element can be used to define the interaction of your visitor and can be: click, button, play, stop. Personally, I use it to specify the place of my button/signup form/ad.
• Label – Use this to identify the type of event that is tracked.
• Value – This element helps you specify a value for you event that can be used when you setup a goal for your event.

If you would like to see a working example, here’s what I used to track a link to my new product, where “Ads” is the category of my link, “Sidebar” the place where I added the link and “WAB” the label.

a href=”http://www.webanalyticsblueprint.com/” onclick=”_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Ads', 'Sidebar', 'WAB']);”

Then once you setup your links, all you have to do is just setup that event as a goal, using the Category, Action, Label, and Value conditions you have setup for your event.

6. Real-Time Reporting

Google has taken analytics one step further recently and introduced Real-Time Reporting, which displays information about visitors that are on your website in a specific moment.

Your are able to see how many visitors are on your website in that moment, where they are on your website, from where they come (keywords and referrals) and where they live.

Additionally, you have access to another 3 reports with more insights about their location, how they arrived on your website and what pages they visit.

To access the real-time reports you need to go to the [Home] menu [REAL-TIME (BETA)].

The [Locations] report will provide you information about the number of your visitors and the countries where they are located. You can also check their location on a map.

[Traffic Sources] will display information about where they come from. You will see the medium and source along with the total number of your visitors.

The [Content] report will show you what are the active pages that your visitors read and how many active visitors are on each of the pages displayed on your report.

7. Multi-Channel Funnels

With Multi-Channel Funnels Google Analytics provides even more value for users who are passionate about conversion rates.

If before you were able to track the last source that the visitor used to convert, with Multi-Channel Funnels you are able to also track other sources (ads, referrals, social media, organic) that the visitor used to reach your website from.

Let’s say for example that your visitor (Cindy) landed for the first time on your website from Twitter and subscribed to your RSS feed.

Next time, Cindy used the feed reader to come and read your new articles. Ultimately she was looking for advice on blogging and found your eBook using a search engine.

Now, because she knows your site already, she will buy it and become a customer.

Using this example, in the old version of Google Analytics the search engine was used to be credited for the conversion, but now, with Multi-Channel Funnels you can see the whole path that Cindy took to convert: Social Network Referral Search engine.

To check the Multi-Channel Funnels reports, go to the [Conversions] section.

Watch this video to learn more about Multi-Channel Funnels:

8. Use Campaign Tracking

Tracking online marketing campaigns will help you get past that large number of direct visits that come from URL shorteners like bit.ly or clients like tweetdeck.

Additionally, it will help you track more accurately links from other websites and links that you use to promote your content or campaigns.

In order to use Campaign tracking in Google Analytics, you need to tag your URLs with special parameters. Those parameters can be added to your links using the URL Builder tool from Google.

Once you tag your URLs with the mandatory parameters, use them as they are or use an URL shortener when sharing them.

Then, check the [Campaigns] report, under [Traffic Sources] [Sources] to get insights about your online marketing campaigns.

To see step by step instructions and how to check Google Analytics Campaign Tracking reports, read more in this article.

9. Plot Rows

Plot Rows allows you to create instant segments of your data in tabular reports. If you usually look at standard reports, you can use Plot Rows to get more insights from your metrics.

To use this feature, you need to select two rows from any tabular report and then click the [Plot Rows] button from the bottom of the table.

Once you do that, you will see that the chart has changed and you are able to see additional information there about the items that you have selected.

In other words it instantly creates a segment with two of your items compared with the total metrics.

Use this feature to check how your main keywords, referrals or pages compare with each other and with the overall metrics of the site.

But make sure that you select items that do not have a big difference between their metrics (i.e. compare a keyword with 2340 visits with one that has 154).

10. Custom Dashboards

In the old version of Google Analytics you used to have available only one dashboard. However, right now you can create up to 20 dashboards customized to your needs.

To create a custom dashboard, go to the [Home] menu [Dashboards] and select [+New Dashboard].

Once you do that, you will need to choose whether you will want to start from scratch with a blank canvas or get some pointers with the [Starter Dashboard].

Then you can use slick widgets to create custom metrics, pie charts, timelines or tables.

To get started with custom dashboards, have a look at my screenshot above and try to duplicate it or check out 5 Insightful Google Analytics Dashboards.

Then, you will be able to customize it and add the metrics that are relevant to your business.

11. Flow Visualization

Flow Visualization definitely deserves a separate article to present it, but in the meantime I will outline it’s benefits.

Google Analytics rolled out two reports, [Visitors Flow], under the Audience section and [Goal Flow], under the Conversion section.

Visitors Flow

The Visitors Flow will display the path that your visitors have taken to navigate through your website.

You will be able to see, based on a selected dimension, such as country source or keyword, the exact path of your visitors and where they stopped to read your content.

On hover, the report displays for each page additional details, like the total number of visits, how many visitors moved to a different page and how many of them dropped the funnel and left.

If you click on a page, you will be able to highlight the traffic that went through that page, explore traffic through that page or display in a popup even more details.

Goal Flow

The Goal Flow report is essentially a better representation of the Funnel Visualization report and contains the same dimensions as the Visitors Flow report.

But the main difference between this and the Visitors Flow is the fact that the Goal Flow report doesn’t uses all pages, but the steps you configured in the conversion funnel.

Additionally, you can also use advanced segments to filter your data and get additional insights from the Visitors Flow and Goal Flow reports.

Your turn

In this article I presented 11 tips that you should use for your website and ultimately some of my favorite features in Google Analytics, but now it’s your turn to do the same.

What do you like most in Google Analytics and what features/tricks you think that everyone should know about?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/ISAx7AOGrIA/11-google-analytics-tricks-to-use-for-your-website

Put that black hat away. Shady SEO tactics can get your site severely penalized by search engines. Punishments can range from losing organic traffic for a few days to losing it permanently.

For any business, its website is a business asset with value that accrues over time and should be treated as such. Here are five timeless “worst practices” to avoid:

1) Link buying – Attempting to make your site more authoritative by paying for links (see J.C. Penney). 

A major element of most search engines’ ranking algorithm (especially Google’s) is “link popularity.”  Simply put, link popularity is a measure of the authority, trustworthiness and number of links pointing to a domain. Authoritative and trustworthy websites (Forbes, The New York Times, PBS, etc.) are able to pass along a significant amount of their authority and trust if they link to a company’s website. Not surprisingly, these links tend to be very difficult to get. However, there are also cases where sheer “tonnage” of links suffice to boost rankings and organic search traffic.

Unfortunately, it’s very common for sites to try to cheat the system. Instead of creating a remarkable website, stellar services and content, unethical Web marketers try to buy their way to the top by purchasing links. There is no shortage of site owners who would link to a site for a fee. Buying links should be avoided at all costs. It is a violation of any search engine’s Terms of Service, and it can get a site banned from the index.

J.C. Penney famously got caught in 2011 for buying large amounts of links. The company was banned from Google’s index for 90 days. While losing a full fiscal quarter’s worth of profit from organic search traffic is certainly nothing to take lightly, that’s not the worst-case scenario. Plenty of sites without the brand clout of J.C. Penney have been banned for much longer periods of time for the same infraction.

If “building links” is a service that an agency or vendor offers to you, have them explain to you exactly how they’re building links, and how their methods are within the engines’ Terms of Service.

2) Cloaking – Serving different content to a search engine versus a human visitor. 

The term “cloaking” certainly sounds dark and mysterious, but the concept is relatively simple. It means that a Web server will deliver different content based on whether the request is coming from a search engine or a Web browser.

Some “black hat” Web marketers use cloaking for very nefarious purposes, serving pages that are radically different to engines and humans. Usually the cloaked version served to the search engines is very text heavy (which engines understand well) and often targets off-topic, popular phrases just for the traffic it might pull in. The version served to humans is typically a conversion-centric page with very little content, trying to lure some fraction of visitors to pull out their credit cards and spend some money.

Not all cloaking is done with malicious intent. A few years ago, I worked with a very large comparison-shopping site, helping the international versions of its sites generate more traffic. One of the interesting things I noticed immediately was that it was cloaking its own home pages! Instead of the version that humans saw with products, photos and marketing copy, the cloaked version was a simple list of links to most of the categories for which the sites had products.

When I brought this issue to light, it turned out that the engineer responsible had knowingly done this. He thought it would be more helpful to search engines to present a simple list of links to enable them to discover the content on the site. He didn’t even know that cloaking was against the rules and could get the sites banned!

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Article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/gyro/2012/03/13/top-5-outlawed-seo-tactics/