South Florida Web Marketing Blog

Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re talking about how to give your content a better chance of going viral, and from virality, what I really mean here is not just getting links, which are obviously very helpful from an SEO perspective, but getting social shares, getting mentions on other blogs, getting talked about, getting emailed around. The virality of content determines how successful that content is going to be in the broader Web, in the scheme of all things that are inbound, not just SEO, not just social, not just community stuff, but overall. There are a few things that you can do that will significantly help your efforts to earn that content virality. So let’s talk about a few of them.

Number one, the right format or the right UI or UX, user experience. What I’m talking about here is a lot of people think that they can take the same way that they produce content normally, keep on doing that, and sometimes that works, especially if you have a very, very clean site, maybe it’s in a blog format and it’s got nice width. It’s not too hampered by advertising and surrounded by that kind of stuff. But oftentimes you will see that content can perform better when it’s in a separate type of format. So let’s say you’ve got a traditional page layout that has content section here but a big header up here and a top ad and a bottom ad and a bunch of sidebar stuff. And maybe you think, “You know what? I’m actually going to clean that up to something that has branding but minimal branding, got a great headline, got the content right in there, and that’s the focus of the page.” So the users who come to it can easily, above the fold, find the content that they’re looking for, that there’s compelling visuals.

These visuals are particularly important because both Google+ and Facebook, if you do any sharing on either of those platforms, remember that they’ll automatically insert an image from the post, and oftentimes the user can select which image. If you’ve got a couple compelling images that look great when scaled down, that look great when you’re going to share them on Facebook or on Google+ or that somebody else who is going to copy those images and put them on their site, oh man, much, much more successful.

Even if you have literally just a piece of writing, if you can have some sort of a visual element that is compelling, that’s interesting, that draws in the reader, that’s relevant, you’re going to do much, much better. Flickr Creative Commons is great for this. Drawing your own stuff is great for this. Charts and graphs are great for this. Even licensing out someone to do a tiny amount of work for a few hundred dollars around building a visual for you, taking some of the data or some of the insight that you’ve learned that you’re putting into that content can be really helpful to help it go more viral.

Then doing things like, you know, you’ve got to have the design look and feel professional. It has to be modern and updated. Clean is very, very good for getting that sharing principle. You can see this happen all the time with content that’s shared on major media websites, where it’s the print friendly version that gets emailed around, that makes its way around Twitter and around Google+ and Facebook and goes on LinkedIn. It’s almost always the one that people will link to in a Reddit or a Hacker News or on Stumble Upon. Print friendly versions, just make that the default for content that you want to have virality.

Then finally I’d also be looking at the title friendliness itself, and the URL actually matters a lot now too. So if you’ve got a pre-existing CMS, when you go to bit.ly or you to goo.gl or whatever your URL shortener is, you might want to try something like this, getting the customized one. So for example, you’ll see that when I have content that I like to share a lot, I might say for example, “Oh, let’s make this content say inbound startups, and that’ll be my slide share presentation.” So now you don’t have to remember some long URL. It’s just bit.ly/inboundstartups, and that will take you right to my presentation here, that URL functions. Customizing this portion of the shared URL can be very helpful if you can’t control it. If you can though, go with something easy, simple, short, not too many parameters in there. This will also help you. I might even, for some things, recommend dropping the slash articles or the slash blog and going just with /catchy-subject, whatever that subject line is. You ‘re going to shrink down the title so that it’s easily understandable so if somebody ever sees that URL or hovers on it, they think, “Oh, that sounds interesting. I should click that link. That might be cool.”

Number two, great, fantastic way to make sure that your content is going to at least perform decently on the Web is to get buy-in from your influencers, the influencers in a community, before, not after, not during, but before you ever publish it. So I’ll give you a great example. I got an email last Friday from a guy in the search world and he said, “Hey Rand, my company, we produce this big report. We’ve got this cool infographic, lots of interesting data about stuff that’s happening in the world. Would you take a look at this? Tell me what you think. Do you think your community would like it?” And I wrote back and said, “Yeah, I really love this. I think it’s excellent. I don’t even have any changes. I think this is going to do great, and I’d be happy to share it.” This person didn’t specifically ask me for a share and I think that’s why. What they asked me for was feedback.

That feedback, coming from people who have a powerful forum, 6,000 RSS readers, 500 people following them on Google+, you can find these people. You probably already know about them in your niche or your sphere, who they are, the key bloggers, the key Twitter accounts, the key Google+ accounts, the key people on LinkedIn, the people who run popular websites, the influencers. Then you can essentially draw them back to whatever it is that’s your content in here, and they will be much more likely to share if you ping them about it beforehand. They’ll also give you feedback like, “I don’t really think this is going to play well,” or “If you did this, it’d be very interesting, but I don’t see what you’ve done as particularly unique or valuable. I probably wouldn’t share it.” Or no response at all. If you get lots of those, you know that you’re not hitting it out of the park with this content. You’re going to have to do something else, try something else. That’s great to know before you hit that publish button.

There’s a bunch of things you can get from them. So if you’re thinking, boy, I just can’t get these people to share what I’m producing. I don’t know what I can do, get them involved in the actual content itself. So rather than you writing an opinion blog post saying I like this particular thing and that particular thing, you can instead go and gather. Hey, can I solicit your review and opinion on a subject, and then I’m going to gather that from several experts and publish that. I’m going to run a survey of you and 20 other people who are influencers in the field about particular things, about some data from your sites, your projects, your experiences, your businesses, whatever it is, or your opinions on this matter. I’m going to interview you or do some lessons learned stuff. I shared a great link last week that was a bunch of video interviews of entrepreneurs, and this type of stuff performs tremendously well because all of those people who are involved in the project, from an interviewee perspective, they are all going to share it after it’s produced because you write back to them and you say, “Hey, the interview is now live. The data is now live. The review is now live.”

You can request input from their communities. For example, when SEOmoz does the SEO Industry Survey every two years, we always ask, hey, would you share this with your community so that we can get the input of people who read Search Engine Land or Search Engine Watch or SEO Book or Search Engine Journal, a variety of these places. HubSpot, etc.

If you can’t directly reach out, you can always mention these people. So if you, for example, gather things that they’ve tweeted, said on their own blogs, you’re getting quotes from them, you’re getting data they’ve shared, you’re using numbers from them, anything like that, you can say, “Oh, by the way, we mentioned you or we’re going to be mentioning you in an upcoming piece, would you like to take a look at it and review and let us know if it’s appropriate or okay, if this is accurate?” That process of interacting in an authentic way, both to confirm that you do have accurate data and that you’re doing the right thing with them, gives them a buy-in to, “Oh, I’m going to go check out this article. Huh, this is interesting. Yeah, this looks great, thanks very much.” Or, “Oh I have this little bit of feedback for you.” Then when you publish, you can say, “Hey, we hit publish. It’s now live. Thanks again for reviewing. If you would share with your community, that’d be great. Here’s the shortened link or here’s a tweet you could retweet.” This kind of stuff works phenomenally well. This process of getting that early buy-in ahead of time is so powerful, and it just makes sure that the content does much better than it normally would.

The third and final thing that I’m going to mention here – topic, timing, and seeding. So this is essentially the process of figuring out what works best in your community, and that’s from a topical perspective. Copyblogger has a lot of good posts about how to write a compelling headline and what’s going to be popular right now. But I would think about it this way. If it’s being mentioned in the news, so for example if I go to, let’s say this is Google Insights or Google Trends or the news timeline, and I see mentions it is at the steady state point but has a spike here, this is where I want to be writing about that topic. Or maybe right after, when there’s usually that second bump of people having a discussion about it. If you can, you might even want to catch it here, before it goes hot, and then you’ll have a chance to appear in things like Google News and you’ll have a chance to be mentioned in all the articles that talk about that subject thereafter. This is great for anytime you have a timely or trending type of topic.

You also want to, in addition to all these influencers you talk to, there are likely a few people, these are your buddies, your friends, people you connect with on a regular basis, you’re emailing with them, you follow each other on Twitter. Do them a favor. Start sharing some of their content. When they tweet things, retweet them. Build up those relationships. Almost all of you probably have a few of those already. Leverage those. Email them in person and say, “Kenny, I know you’ve got a small Twitter account. It’d be awesome if you could share this. If you ever need the same favor from me, just ask.” Almost always, especially if those are close relationships, personal relationships, you’ve hung out in a bar before, you’ve bought each other dinner, you know each other well, you’re going to get that. I think that’s a great way to leverage the real world social network for online social networks. Obviously, you have to be careful not to abuse this. You want to be sharing stuff that these people would ordinarily want to share and be interested in.

Then finally timing stuff. I can tell you for B2B content, Saturday and Sunday are just straight out. However, the reverse is true for Facebook, where the most sharing and the most time spent on Facebook happens on the weekends. Now, not surprisingly, that’s not B2B Facebooking. That’s personal Facebooking. So it better be the kind of stuff that’s going to play well with your mom and your grandma and your brother and that kind of stuff. B2B, Tuesday through Thursday. Don’t do Monday. Don’t do Friday. With the exception of, it appears that some of the best content or most successful tweeting happens on Friday morning, sort of Thursday night going into Friday morning. That’s when people seem to be tweeting and retweeting a lot of stuff. This is from some research from Dan Zarrella over at HubSpot. You can look into that. The timing of social media, I believe, is his presentation.

So don’t necessarily take my word for it. Test, test, test. If you’re sharing content and producing content on a regular basis, you will figure out the right times to share, who you can start seeding things with, who’s reliable and helps you get that content out there, what topics work well, what sorts of headlines work well for your audience. It’s going to be different for everyone. So don’t just trust these. But do test and observe and watch your click through rates, using something like a bit.ly, watching your analytics, seeing what works when you share things and how long it takes for them to go and what sources indicate. Sometimes you’re going to share with this one guy and he’s going to populate it to tons of places. One of my favorite features for this is Google+’s ripples, where you can actually see, it’s almost like this. It’ll actually show you a timeline of this person shared and then these 13 other people shared and 1 of them produced 10 more shares. That stuff is very powerful, and you can observe it on the regular Web, on the rest of the Web, across platforms if you’re carefully watching analytics or your bit.ly click throughs.

So hopefully, using this methodology, you can produce some content that has higher chances, better odds of going viral. I wish you luck. I hope to see lots of great stuff out there on the Web. Take care. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/ftsFD313Fdk/how-to-increase-the-odds-of-your-content-going-viral-whiteboard-friday

Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 1:53 PM

Webmaster Level: All

When we launched Google+ pages in November, we also released Google+ badges to promote your Google+ presence right on your site. Starting today in developer preview (and soon available to all your users), we’re adding more options for integrating the Google+ badge into your website. You can configure a badge with a width that fits your site design and choose a version that works better on darker sites. You’ll also see that Google+ badges now include the unified +1 and circle count that we added to Pages last month.

If you’re still considering whether to add a Google+ badge on your website, consider this: We recently looked at top sites using the badge and found that, on average, the badge accounted for an additional 38% of followers. When you add the badge visitors to your website can discover your Google+ page and connect in a variety of ways: they can follow your Google+ page, +1 your site, share your site with their circles, see which of their friends have +1’d your site, and click through to visit your Google+ page.

The Google+ Badge makes it easy for your fans to find and follow you on Google+. With these additional options, we hope it’s even easier to create a badge that fits your website.

Follow the conversation on Google+.

Posted by Lucy Hadden, Software Engineer, Google+

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/amDG/~3/cz8fpcIdFYQ/new-google-badges.html

“Why can’t you just give me a straight answer?”

Johanna’s voice showed a trace of irritation.  “All I’m asking is how much you charge for SEO services!”

I smiled. This was familiar terrain. As an SEO consultant, almost every client asks me a similar question. My answer is always the same.

“It depends. On many things. Because SEO is not a turn-key solution you plug in to play.”

“Wait.  You’re an expert – and you can’t tell me what you’ll charge?!”

That’s when I explain why and when SEO matters, and the dynamic process of fixing my price for SEO consulting.

Broadly speaking, here’s what I share – and 3 analogies I use to make it easier to understand – buying a car, an iceberg or a dam!

Why SEO Matters

Every client likes to save money while getting great results from search engine optimization. But by always looking to save money on SEO, you’ll take your eye off the more important issue of intelligently allocating your marketing budget across various tactics, of which, SEO is often the most cost effective.

SEO isn’t simple or easy. Google itself rates websites based on over 200 ranking criteria – and keeps tweaking the algorithm constantly, up to 600 times in a year.

So if an ‘expert’ takes one look at your site and quotes you a “complete price” for SEO, run for the hills (or at least exercise extreme caution). Sure, they may fix some glaring weaknesses, or help you pick the low hanging fruit – but deep and lasting SEO is about a lot more than that.

Simple ‘Gold’, ‘Silver’ and ‘Bronze’ packages don’t work for SEO. SEO isn’t something you install or plug in to your website. It’s not a ‘one-time’ operation. Good SEO is a process. Research and planning are critical components of it.

That’s why no SEO consultant can make an off-hand estimate, or set a ‘price per site’ for their services. Everything depends upon your goals and targets, the nature of your business, your audience, and more.

There’s good reason why, as a client, you shouldn’t focus on the cost alone. It’s better to concentrate on the key performance indicators (KPIs) of your business such as the cost per acquisition, profit per sale, conversion rate and others.

A cheap SEO service may save you a little cash, but you won’t earn a lot from it either. In fact, it’s more likely that you’ll “save yourself into the poor-house!”

So ask yourself these critical questions first:

• Why are you even thinking about hiring an SEO consultant?
• Is SEO merely going to be your alibi instead of your ‘secret weapon’?
• Are you looking for SEO help just because everyone’s doing it, or your marketing department insists upon trying it?
• Or are you developing an SEO strategy to skyrocket your rankings, and along with it your profit?

Then, depending on the type of client, I introduce one (or all) of the 3 analogies.

Analogy #1: SEO Is Like Buying a Car, Your Price Will Match Your Needs

Johanna kept nodding her head, listening attentively to all that I said… but she still wasn’t convinced.

“Well, that’s fine,” she continued. “But I still want to know what it will cost to get my site optimized for search engines. How much does SEO cost?”

I asked her, “How much does it cost to buy a car?”

Johanna was a little confused. “Why, that depends.”

“Exactly” I said.  “The price you’ll pay for a car will depend on the make and model, its size and purpose, where you’ll drive it, and with whom. A sturdy station wagon for your family will be priced differently from a sports car you want to show-off!”

SEO services also range in price depending on what you want from it. The best SEO strategy begins by evaluating needs and problems of your prospective clients. It then deploys SEO as a magnet to attract only the most relevant leads out of the vast ocean of online Web surfers.

Setting up your website to do this effectively and well isn’t easy. Building laser focused landing pages targeted at sub-segments of your audience can draw a flood of relevant traffic that converts nicely into customers. But getting this right takes time and resources.

Cheap SEO is like bargain hunting. You might save some money. But you won’t earn much either. The way I practice SEO is not qualified guesswork that endangers a client’s business. Research and analysis come first, often followed by a face to face meeting with clients to gather all relevant information.

There’s nothing “turnkey” or “standard” about this kind of SEO. You can’t buy it, install it, and sit back. It is dynamic and constantly evolving. The ranking signals are in constant flux, and are impacted by various external factors, not just on-site ones.

SEO is also not about “fixing” things. Viewing SEO as a quick fix for reduced sales or traffic is a big mistake. You’ll only end up leaving money on the table (a lot of it!)

Good SEO must deliver a huge ROI. It is not just about getting high rankings and more traffic, clicks and page views. It’s about converting those visitors into paying customers. What happens before the landing page has a major impact on conversion rates.

SEO consulting of high caliber will help you:

• find your customers’ intent, needs and pressing problems
• identify their expectations from your business or website
• decide how you will deliver value (on the landing page)
• uncover areas of profitability
• pick triggers that convert visitors into customers
• personalize the experience for each visitor

Getting all these elements of SEO right takes a lot of time. Knowing where to begin for the best, fastest results will takes tremendous research. But the investment is worthwhile, because it will earn you a high return.

That’s why SEO should never be viewed as a cost. It’s an investment. One that pays off for a long time.

Analogy #2: SEO Is Like An Iceberg, Mainly Hidden But With Massive Impact

It is said 90% of the mass of an iceberg is under the water, hidden from view. SEO is just the same.

While you might see only the attractive top ranking on Google as the impact of your SEO, there are a hundred unseen elements at play, all working in concert to deliver the collective impact of intelligent optimization.

Like icebergs, SEO has some serious risks to balance the great opportunities it creates. Boats, ships, cruisers and even ocean liners have run aground on hidden rocks under the sea. And countless businesses have paid a steep price for wrongly executed SEO campaigns.

Mainly, such campaigns were put together by amateurs. Business owners wrongly assume that any Internet consultant is capable of “good enough” SEO, and hand it over to a Web designer or developer.

Just because they’re already in there coding or designing your website is not a reason to thrust SEO upon a Web designer or programmer. That’s like saying you’ll just get your plumber to do the wiring because he’s already working on the walls! Web developers are great at developing. SEO experts are best at SEO.

Sometimes, through sheer good luck (or even accident), you may own a great business with top search rankings and a steady flow of traffic coming in. That’s “good enough” – but with SEO, it can become so much more. And only a specialist can deliver great results.

SEO is well known to be one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing. For this reason, SEO should have a larger budget. Yet even after Web analytics data prove beyond doubt that SEO is the absolute winner at driving more traffic, many companies pay little attention to it.

In today’s competitive online arena, SEO cannot be relegated to the status of a secondhand job any longer.

It is not a trivial task to be handed over to a friend or distant cousin who knows how to “fix it”. It shouldn’t be put off until the site is ready to launch. SEO should be the first thing to focus on. And there’s a reason for this.

Not everyone will arrive at your website through the homepage. Search engines will not ask you which of your landing pages you wish to have listed in their directory.  Generic searches on business critical keywords will throw up different entry points into your website. Many visitors will enter through these back doors.

Knowing why they landed at your site, what they expect to find, and what motivates or drives them to seek your solution is critical information if you are to capture their attention, retain their interest and gain their trust.

How will you optimize every page on your large website later on?

It’s far easier to plan for it in advance. This is something I insist upon with SEO clients. After all, if your website (or any section of it) is not important enough for you to do this, why does it even exist in the first place?

Analogy #3:  SEO Is Like a Dam – Open Flood Gates Traffic Just Keeps Flowing

Dams across massive rivers store water. Think about search engines like Google as huge dams that store your targeted visitors, and your listing on SERPs (search engine results pages) as holes in the dam. Punch enough of them, and you’ll be drowned in a flood of traffic!

That’s a great reason to start optimizing your website right now – and not take it in small steps, but go for a massive overhaul.

No matter what niche you are involved in, there are ‘evergreen’ search phrases with the potential to drive a large amount of traffic to your website for years. And this traffic is free! It will continue without any dent in your ongoing or proposed marketing budget.

But optimizing just one page on your website will only deliver one extra traffic stream. What if you opened the flood gates?

Keyword research will reveal that many searches are carried out on business related and highly relevant ‘non-brand’ generic keywords. These are used by people who have never even heard about you, but are focused on their needs and problems, actively seeking out solutions. That’s the ‘water’ behind the ‘dam’ that you can tap into through SEO.

Or if you don’t like the idea of punching holes in a dam, think of your keyword research as finding a pinata, the decorated papier mache container full of candy, that you can break open to get a treat. SEO is the candy king!

Speaking of candy, a website without strategically planned design is little more than eye candy. If all it does is look nice without providing any value, then it’s like playing trick-or-treat with kids – but keeping all the sweets for yourself!

Elements other than SEO are important. You should use SEO as a way to convert and engage your visitors. Knowing the intent behind keywords that lead visitors to an individual page on your site will be valuable for your Web designer.

But don’t let your designer start outlining your site or your programmer begin coding your pages before you’ve finalized an SEO strategy and done your keyword analysis. That’s the platform upon which you can build your future success.

You may get everything else right. Your inbound marketing strategy may cover all the bases – heavy SEO, social search, local SEO, mobile optimization – and may integrate nicely with other parts of your offline and digital marketing. But without diligent keyword research underlying it all, you’re only building a superstructure upon quicksand. That’s just not smart or effective.

In 2012 or 2013, I’m guessing that search and social media will meld. Researching generic long tail keywords and merging them with local terms like cities, place names and more will become important. The growth of mobile search and the rising awareness and experience of search engine users in general will power this trend.

When you know what savvy searchers are looking for, identify the exact keywords and combinations they use, and map them to individual pages on your website, it will make the difference between a 1% and a 20% conversion rate.

Do you think it might be a good idea to raise earnings from an individual page by 20% or more? Definitely, yes!

Do you think it’s quick and easy work to do this for each page?  Absolutely not!

An extensive e-commerce website with thousands of products for sale will have prospective buyers with totally (or at least slightly) different tastes and needs. Optimizing your site for each of them is important.  The text on your site, the visual appearance, the products and services you present to them – all need to fit into the concept of an “ideal solution” that your visitor has in his or her mind.

If you add value to their lives based on uniquely individual needs, you will boost sales.

Who Should Be In Charge of Your SEO?

Definitely not the information technologists.  The project should be owned by your marketing department.

At a local conference on SEM a few years ago, I heard the term “Business Prevention Unit” applied to the IT department! There was a brief stunned silence. A few seconds later, everyone burst out laughing.

During breaks and in other presentations, people talked about this remark. It’s especially appealing to me because so many of my clients start out thinking about SEO as a purely technical challenge. That’s so wrong!

SEO is about becoming a detective, a hunter, an explorer. You’re out looking for opportunities hidden inside the psychology of your prospects and customers.

This is a mindset that’s totally foreign to an IT manager, server administrator, programmer, Web designer or other technician. If you want to put food on the table, hire a hunter!

At the same time, it is wise to keep in mind that SEO is a team game. One of my clients runs a large website with over 10 million pages indexed in Google. Optimizing each one of them individually is simply not feasible. It would be too costly in time and money. Manually tweaking every page isn’t practical, even if it’s the ideal solution.

Therefore, an SEO strategy is critical.

Where is the highest profit lying hidden? Where should we focus to reach business goals set strategically for the long term?

The answers to those questions are important. And automation is important. So is optimizing the website structure and coding. A comprehensive plan to work on such a big site is mandatory. Having an expert programmer and great server administrator as part of the team is helpful. With literally millions of page views each day, it won’t help to hire just a great SEO strategist.

It also pays to keep in mind that your website is probably the best salesman in your company. But you’re locking him up in a closet! Release him right away.

Knowing that SEO is one of the most cost effective forms of marketing out there, it’s surprising that more companies don’t invest heavily into this. Is it because it “looks too good to be true”? Probably, because so many of my clients seem to think so.

Explaining to them that it’s real, and possible, is quite a challenge.

A part of the problem is technical language, jargon and lingo used by SEO specialists to outline the benefits of their craft to regular business owners.

So, What Does SEO Cost?

If you’ve been watching closely, you’ll notice that I still haven’t answered Johanna’s initial question…  What does SEO cost?

I’ll stick to the same response. It depends.

How high are you willing to jump? How fast are you going to run? I need to know this if I am to estimate how much energy and resources you’ll need.

Pricing SEO is equally difficult. It is complex. There are many rich opportunities. Several external factors and ranking signals skew the scenario further. And then, there’s the natural skepticism of a client to overcome.

Is SEO too good to be true?  Are SEO consultants snake oil salespeople who are out to trick and cheat you?

Yes, there are charlatans and cheats out there, and you ought to keep your eyes open and your feet firmly on the ground.

But any Internet marketing manager or business owner who is still not taking SEO seriously should consider stepping down. Because, let’s face it… the most dangerous person is yourself! Especially if you’re a frugal penny pincher looking for cheap results. Remember, in SEO as with life, you reap what you sow!

In the construction industry, there used to be people who dug with shovels. A company that invented and used the “digging machine” made results happen faster, easier and at lower cost.

Effective SEO is just like that. It can bring you better results faster and at a lower cost. That’s why you shouldn’t even consider letting anyone else handle your SEO tasks.

What does a rope cost?

Asking how much SEO will cost is like asking how much rope costs. It will depend upon how many meters you need, the quality of the rope, what you plan to use it for, or how long you want it to last. You can buy the cheapest rope you find, but will it be good enough?

Hiring an SEO consultant is similar. Just like rope has its per meter price, SEO has a price too – maybe a per hour rate. How many hours you will pay for depends upon all these factors we’ve discussed earlier.

And what you pay for is not what it costs you. That is defined by the return you get on your investment. If an SEO consultant delivers a boost in sales and profit that’s 5, 10 or 25 times what you paid, it didn’t cost you anything!

So that’s how I answer Johanna’s question – which is the same question many clients ask their SEO consultants.

I’m sure you’ve faced some frustrating challenges while trying to explain the value of what you do, to a client who can’t see it as any different from the dozen other marketing and designing tasks underway. Or when you’re called in as an SEO specialist to fix things after the entire website is built and running. Got any interesting stories that come to mind?  Go ahead and share it in a comment.

What do you do when you’re asked about pricing your SEO services? Do you have any personal experiences or favorite analogies you use?  What happens when you’re asked to give a ‘fixed price quote’ upfront? Tell us how you overcome price objections.

As a customer, what do you look for with SEO consulting? What parts do you wish your SEO consultant explained better or insisted upon more firmly? Please let us know, too.

Image credit: Crestock.com

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Google: SEO

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Article source: http://searchengineland.com/how-much-does-seo-cost-3-analogies-to-help-you-determine-its-value-108870

Optimizing a website for local search is important for a few reasons. First, the number of smart phone and tablet users is on the rise meaning that a larger percentage of searches are being performed “on the go”. Mobile web searchers are often looking for local information and local establishments. Second, search is becoming more personalized and search results vary depending on individual search behavior, social media connections, and location. Therefore, it’s important to consider the following local SEO best practices while conducting an SEO campaign:

Incorporate Local Keywords
The first step of an SEO campaign is to conduct keyword research to find out how target audience members are searching for the products or services that you provide. Skipping this step can result in less traffic or less qualified traffic that won’t convert. Keyword research should first be conducted nationally, and then localized later by adding the city or town, state, and neighborhood in front of the chosen keyword. For example, for a local pizza shop it makes more sense to optimize for “Anytown NY pizza place” than it does to target the much more broad “pizza place”.

Develop Local Search Profiles
You don’t need to be a business that only operates locally to create a local search profile. In fact, all businesses should submit their information to Google, Yahoo!, and Bing local directories. It improves search engine results page visibility, increases your online real estate, and builds another legitimate inbound link to your website.

Include Contact Information
Contact information including a physical address, a mailing address, and a phone number should be included on every page of the site and should be crawlable text that the search engine spiders can “read”. For many websites it makes sense to include this information in the footer.

Optimize Social Profiles
Just as you would optimize your website for local keywords, it’s important to do the same to your social media pages. Optimize the title of the page using a local keyword and include local terms in the bio sections as well as in post content whenever it makes sense to do so.

Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Friendly
What’s the point of optimizing your site for local search from mobile devices if your site can’t be viewed on a mobile device? You can’t assume that a visitor will return to your site at a later time on a desktop. In fact, it’s doubtful that that will happen. They will simply go to your competitor’s site and do business with them instead.

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Article source: http://isedb.com/20111230-16168.php

Welcome to 2012, everybody! We hope your holiday festivities were smashing successes, and that you brought in the New Year with joy, appreciation, and excitement for an even better 2012. Most of us have made New Year’s resolutions to exercise, eat better, overcome irrational fears (okay, maybe that’s just me) and more- so, here’s to sticking to all of these resolutions and more. With new goals to achieve and a clean slate with which to approach them, we should all enter this New Year with excitement for many promising days ahead, especially when it comes to working extra hard to triumph in a bad economy.

If you are a small business owner, likely your number one resolution is to bring in more business this year – in fact, if you are a business owner of any size, this is likely your goal. With that in mind, as many of you know, one way to approach this is to invest time, money and energy into Search Engine Optimization. Though there will undoubtedly be more challenges to face in 2012 as SEO grows and evolves (and as Panda updates continue to be run), ultimately, we all adapt and work together to achieve a better, more user friendly internet experience.  The most important thing to remember going into 2012 is that the game has changed. It’s not about just link-building anymore; it’s about branding, content, social media, and more.

SEO in 2012

So, keeping all of that in mind, I’ve drummed up six things SEOs should adhere to as they get back to work after the holidays (at least, these are the factors the folks here at ESI are focusing on!):

1. On-Page Factors: Make Sure Title Tags and Meta Descriptions Read Well

In much earlier posts, we have discussed the importance of optimizing your title tags and meta-descriptions. Just as a refresher, your title tags should include at least one (if not two) of your high-priority keywords, and should not exceed a 70 character limit. Your meta-description, which should be under 157 characters, should also include these keywords, as well as a call to action. But what’s important about creating these important elements for your website in 2012? Gone are the days of the mechanical title tags and meta-descriptions: conversational, catchy and well-written title tags and meta-description are incredibly important for SEO success now. For those who were reluctant to spend a little extra time on these on-page factors, carving out creative time to do so might be a good (albeit, slightly late) resolution.

1. Improve the Relevancy Off-Page Factors: Link-Building

Link-building is as important as ever, but with the Panda update, higher quality links are paramount. Further, these links should be relevant to your site, and spammy links should be avoided at all costs. Further, rather than simply building links for your highest priority keywords, be sure to focus on branding as well.  Further, make sure to go after quality over quantity when it comes to link-building!

1. Create High-Quality Content… and Keep Creating!

In my (somewhat crazy) mind, I tend to think that all SEOs have chants continuously repeating in their heads – or, at least they should – to me, “Content is king” is and should always be on your mind if you are an interactive marketer. As Panda continues to be run, content will continue to rein over the land of SEO, and if you aren’t consistently creating fresh and unique content, you will be expelled from the kingdom (too far? Probably – but it’s my first day back, so give me a break!). Create content that users will want to read and engage with, comment on and share with their friends and colleagues (while this is easier said than done, it’s something to strive for. Spend some time getting to know your audience before beginning to write, and you might notice improvement!).

1. Implement the Rel=Author Markup

The authority of content has also been important, and will very likely continue to be this year. How do you prove the authority of your content? Well, you (or whoever writes content for your blog) use the rel=author markup (if Google approves you, that is). This necessitates having a Google + profile, and linking it to an author page on your blog. With a clear headshot, someone who has the rel=author tag correctly set up will likely see his or her information show up in the SERPs when his or her blog posts come up in the results.

1. Get Social, Especially On Google +

It’s always a good idea to expand your social reach – for marketing and SEO purposes. Think about it – Google wants to create a good experience for the user. Isn’t it evidence that users want to hear from a company, if that company is engaging and interactive with its customers and therefore popular on social media? If, last year, you knew this but didn’t act on it, maybe it’s time to take the proverbial leap of faith and get to work on social media monitoring and marketing.  In this case, it’s important to be a social climber!

This is especially true when it comes to Google +, which we know impacts the rankings on the SERPs signed in Google users see. Plus, posts made on Google (like, say, from a business page) tend to show up pretty high in the search results anyways. This is reason enough for both you personally AND your business to have a presence on Google’s social network. Sharing photos, videos and other types of viral content will only contribute to a positive outcome when it comes to climbing the rankings.

1. Focus on Local and Mobile

With an ever-increasing number of people using cell phones and tablets to access the internet, SEO has had to adapt to a correspondingly growing local audience. Focusing on local keywords and mobile optimization will be one key to success in the coming year.

But Don’t Forget the Basics

While you’re doing your best to keep up with the changes to Google’s algorithm and to interactive marketing as a whole, don’t forget to stop, breathe, and remember the fundamentals too. SEO is about climbing the organic rankings and putting yourself in front of your potential customers.  Always keep the customer in mind, remember to create a website that is both engaging for the user AND satisfying when it comes to the search engines (and not just one or the other), get the important directory listings, and continue to guest-blog.  Go for a holistic approach; you won’t find one single smoking gun that will bring you to that coveted number one spot, but rather you will find your success in a balanced combination of a multitude of factors.

More Information

If you’re looking for more free SEO tips, updates and information about interactive marketing, come back and revisit our blog for regular updates about what’s going on in the industry. If you have questions that are more specifically related to your company’s SEO efforts, give us a call at 770-481-1766.

Related Information:

12 Things We Lived, Learned and Learned to Live With In SEO This Year

Google Plus Thanksgiving Day Commercial: What Does it Signal?

Digital Atlanta: Discussing the Usefulness of Google +

5 Common Content Mistakes to Avoid

Now, You Can Put a Face to the Blog

Google Has 60% of Search Market Share as Plus Grows

Google Ushers in New Year with Plus Changes

Google +1 Button Changes, Twitter Redesign Up the Ante on the Web

Local SEO Tips

Read more posts on Everspark Interactive »

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Article source: http://www.businessinsider.com/6-seo-tips-for-the-new-year-2012-1

by Claudia Bruemmer

While Search Engine Optimization tactics evolve over the years, the good old basic tactics remain valid. That means keyword research, search-friendly URLs, Title tags, Meta descriptions, headers, great content, images with Alt tags, optimized videos and linking. As Google and other search engines continue to tweak their algorithms to benefit users, wholesalers must think about satisfying the needs of their users as well as search engine robots. This article will review traditional SEO tactics that can be used to create great pages for top rankings.

Keyword Research: Keyword research is the foundation of SEO. Even though search algorithms are highly sophisticated and complex, you basically get found by your keywords. For an explanation of the value of keyword research see the SEO Moz Beginner’s Guide to Keyword Research.

Search Friendly URLs: While URLs are not a huge ranking factor, search-friendly URLs are important because they provide a good user experience as well as information for search robots. Put relevant keywords in your URLs as this provides anchor text when people use your URLs to link to your pages.

Title Tags: The title tag is the main text that describes an online document. It is the single most important on-page SEO element and appears in three key places: the top of a browser, search engine results pages, and on external websites as link anchor text. Best practice is to use no more than 70 characters in the Title and to use strategic keywords.

Meta Description Tags: The Meta description tag draws readers to a website from the SERPs; thus, it is very important for gaining user click-through from search results. As a short paragraph describing the content on the page, the description tag should be compelling, contain strategic keywords and contain between 150 and 160 characters.

Headers: Headers are handy for scanning content and they provide clues search engines. Use keywords in your headers wherever possible.

Content: All copywriting gurus say to write great content, but what does that mean? Write accurate, descriptive and compelling text about your products. Use the thesaurus in your word processing program for synonyms to keep from being repetitive. Have your keyword list handy for use whenever it’s relevant. Use tools like ubersuggest to get ideas for improving your content. Use keywords in the beginning, middle and end several times throughout the page. The old adage is to write for the user first and search engines second, but keep both in mind when creating content.

Images: A picture is worth a thousand words and can be used to good advantage by wholesalers. There’s even a possibility that the image and its associated Alt text can help boost your rankings. However, use relevant images and accurate, descriptive Alt text.

Videos: Videos have been displaying in search results since Universal Search; yet, many wholesalers don’t use them. Featuring videos on your web pages can help you upsell, drive traffic and make your site sticky. Make sure your videos are relevant and optimized.

Inbound Links: Authoritative inbound links are links that can help your site become a subject matter expert in your niche. Google rewards authoritative links in its algorithm. An example of an authoritative link for a wholesale jeweler might be a link to its site from The Fashion Jewelry Accessories Trade Association. Outbound links to pages of interest to your readers are also helpful. For instance, a wholesaler might want to link to pages with basic information about drop shipping or other topics of interest to its target market. Lastly, it’s good practice to link your inner pages to each other for relevant content throughout the site. It takes time and skills to gain authoritative links. For a primer on linking basics, we refer you to the SEO Moz Beginner’s Guide on Linking.

Sitemap: Create a sitemap of all the pages in your site to reveal the link structure so search robots can find all relevant pages of your site for crawling.

Site Validation: Last, but not least, you’ll want to ensure your pages are indexable and links can be followed with the free W3C Markup Validation Service.

In conclusion, SEO basics never go out of style. These tactics will help you create rich web pages that get good rankings. You can combine the above tips on SEO with usability, marketing and psychology principles to create pages that will do exceptionally well in 2012. Just remember to satisfy users and search engines at the same time while implementing the elements above.

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Article source: http://www.toptenwholesale.com/news/basic-seo-tactics-wholesalers-2012-5860.html

If you’re an SEO Jedi, black hat tactics undoubtedly tempt you on a regular basis. Before giving in to the dark side, check out these SEO tips to renew your faith in the [white hat] light side of the Force!

In an earlier post, SEO Wars: Forget Black Hat, White Hat – What Color Is Your Lightsaber, I introduced six unique SEO styles (and respective lightsaber colors) for wielding the Force of magnetic content.

“The Force is what gives an SEO their power. It’s an energy field created by magnetic content that binds search engines, web visitors, and marketers together.”

White hat SEOs are called to a higher purpose of serving up quality content that web visitors would value, while [dark side] black hat SEOs are instead focused solely on the power of search rank, leveraging any tactics necessary to achieve it. Both sides of the Force leverage inbound marketing tactics to organically draw users to content.

The lightsaber color symbolism is fun, yet practical, as noted by this tweet:

Tired of swinging the blue light saber for one client. Its not working. Changing to orange j.mp/seolightsabers @sewatch

— Scott Hendison (@shendison) September 13, 2011

Perhaps you can relate? The rise of the black hat SEO dark side cannot be denied. However, the temptation and seduction can be …if you’re strong with the Force and leverage the right tools.

The SEO Jedi Order: A New Hope…

Listen up, fellow SEOs… it’s time to unite! Provide accountability to your fellow white hat SEOs and creatively contemplate ways to wield the Force of magnetic content.

• Believe in what you’re fighting for…Never forget that the purpose of SEO is to help users seeking your content easily find it. Moreover, search rank means nothing if it doesn’t produce results. White hat tactics fight for the greater good of a quality user experience. Wielding the Force of magnetic content not only boosts authority and relevance with search engines, but it also aids conversion, brand advocacy, and user experience.

  [Luke:] I don’t believe it. [Yoda:] That is why you fail.

• Recognize that black hat SEO is not stronger.Although dark side SEO tactics may yield faster results, the tactics are weak – inevitably failing and therefore only yielding short-term gains. For basically every black hat SEO tactic that “works”, there are white hat SEO tactics that work just as well, or better, because they have long-term value. (Check out these 12 examples of black hat SEO tactics transformed into long-term, white hat SEO wins.)

  [Luke:] “Is the dark side stronger?” [Yoda:] “No, no, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.”

• Learn from SEO Jedi Masters, not just any SEO.With the abundance of SEO spam on the market, novice SEOs (a.k.a. SEO Younglings or SEO Padawans) easily interpret gray or dark side tactics as acceptable means for achieving search rank. Leverage these SEO training resources and learn directly from the [white hat] experts. (Note: A Jedi Master is one who has successfully trained a padawan into a Jedi Knight.)

  [Yoda:] You must unlearn what you have learned.

SEO Jedi Masters actively teach their trade and defend the white hat SEO Jedi Order.
(Action-Oriented, Content/Linking)

(Strategy Measurement)

(Specialized Skills)

6 Compelling SEO Jedi Tactics for Wielding the Force

If you’ve been wielding lightsabers of the light side of the Force and fear it isn’t working, check out these tips for inspiration. Each tactic has generally low competition and therefore presents great opportunity.

1. Universal Search Optimization

Leverage the diversity of Google universal search results mixed with videos, images, shopping, books, maps (local), and news. A SearchMetrics study recently showed that video and image formats dominate Google mixed results, yet few sites actually apply SEO to these assets. Include these assets on your pages and step ahead of the competition. Submit specialized XML sitemaps (image, video, news, local, etc.) to ensure these resources are adequately indexed and apply video optimization and image optimization to assets before publishing. Surround on-page images or videos with relevant textual content to help search engines better understand the asset and in-turn boost the relevance of the page as well.

Note: The Google video sitemap content “includes web pages which embed video, URLs to players for video, OR the URLs of raw video content hosted on your site.” The embedded video indexing option allows you to potentially drive traffic and clicks to your site instead of YouTube. Huge!

Tip: For videos, write a blog post with the embedded video and include additional, relevant engaging info like statistics, commentary, quoted responses, or related remarks. Tools like SpeechPad.com and SpeakerText.com can help with transcription. The added value of the content/video combo will encourage users to link to the web page versus directly to the YouTube video.

2. Clever Link Bait

Link bait is a tantalizing “content treat” that web visitors love so much they’ll link to it via bookmarks, social shares, or blog posts. Fresh, unique content with an exceptional educational, entertaining or X-factor twist qualifies as link bait.

• Infographics or Industry Reports  (trends, historical timelines, statistics, comparisons)
• Comic Writing  (humor on brand-relevant topics that ring true for your audience)
• Comprehensive Guides  (detailed instructions, checklists, “top lists”, training resources)
• Badges  (awards, certifications, achievements, recognition, identity labels)

Examples of quality link bait include: marketing infographics by Unbounce [Oli Gardner], webcomics by the Oatmeal [Matthew Inman], and SEO lightsaber badges by yours truly.

Tip: Include easy-to-copy HTML source code for your link bait. This makes syndication of your content easier and also empowers you to search-optimize the reproduced content with SEOd URLs, link text and image alt attributes.

Webcomics and humor videos are a great way to show that your business/industry (no matter how boring) can be fun. Every industry has something to laugh about. How does Murphy’s Law apply to your business? What’s a bizarre implementation or use of your product? Use it! For example, how could B2B toilet seat sales possibly be entertaining? Get inspired from this video!

3. User-Generated Content (UGC)

Has the Google “freshness” algorithm update got you flustered? Stop fretting about creating great content yourself, and start brainstorming how you can identify and engage brand advocates to generate content for you. Guest blog posts, crowdsourced content, comments, ratings/reviews, QA, testimonials, and user-submitted stories/projects are all great opportunities for building fresh, diverse content that search engines love.

• Guest Blog Posts. Leverage the expertise, diverse writing style, and social network of influencers in your industry. The authors will help promote their articles for you. Example: Unbounce’s Conversion-Fest Blogging Contest.
• Crowdsourced Content. Identify top influencers in your network, ask them to answer a few brief questions, and aggregate their responses into one post. The participants will share the content for you! Example: Recent posts on Crazy Egg’s blog.
• Comments Reviews. Provide tools that empower web visitors to add fresh, relevant content to existing pages for you. Default the sort to display recent posts first to prioritize those for indexing. Make sure the tool provides a means for the content to be indexed by search engines. Example tools: Disqus, Livefyre, PowerReviews and Bazaarvoice. Note: The March 2011-released Facebook Comments Box plug-in is not SEO-friendly by default, but some hacks have been proposed. (In October 2011, Google began indexing Facebook comments generated by AJAX or JavaScript, but don’t forget about Bing and Yahoo.)
• Testimonials. Acquire recommendations by following the “give to get” principle. By giving an endorsement, you can also acquire a backlink. In accordance with testimonial best practices, include your full name, company, title, link and photo along with a “product X solved my problem by…” or a similar value-added description. The specifics for identity and experience provide credibility and a mini story to which readers can relate. When requesting testimonials, ask endorsees to use the same format.

4. Microdata Annotations Rich Snippets

Rich snippets are tiny excerpts of actual content identified via semantic markup and selected to display inline with search results. Star-ratings and reviews are commonly seen rich snippets.

Semantic markup and rich snippets work hand-in-hand. Just apply simple HTML attributes in accordance with semantic markup specifications, and you’ll enable search engines to uniquely index that data and potentially display the rich snippets. The common semantic markup formats have been microformats, RDFa and microdata. (These different types of structured formats are also sometimes referred to as annotations or markup.) In June 2011, Google, Yahoo, and Bing came together in support of microdata as the HTML5 standardized format for semantic markup. The recent hype on updates to Google authorship markup reference rel=author and rel=me attributes which are HTML5 microformats.

Apply these annotations to your content accordingly. Seriously, mark everything up! Well, everything relevant where you’d desire rich snippets. There are 100+ new HTML5 markup types documented with microdata at Schema.org, each of them presenting SEO opportunities. Although this tactic is technically purely aesthetic, tests have shown that rich snippets yield higher click-through rates. On the same note, I can’t help but suspect that search engines may boost search rank for “guinea pig” sites to test new rich snippet formats. Be mindful of this, and track your search rank trends and rich snippet displays accordingly.

Tip: Complete the Rich Snippets Interest Form to get your site on Google’s radar, and leverage the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool to validate your structured page markup/annotations and preview how it will look in search results.

Note: Although some of these annotations have been around for years, a consistent markup format has been lacking along with an adequate quantity of web pages that would justify rich snippet production. The consistent format issue seems to have been resolved. However, this early in the game there’s no guarantee that search engines will display rich snippets, even if annotations have been applied correctly. Be patient, and be ready. Your annotations will eventually bear fruit!

5. Social Media Optimization (SMO)

SMO is the process of optimizing content for social interaction, discussion and sharing. Since social influences are an integral part of SEO strategy from both a causation and correlation perspective, empower social interaction by providing on-page tools to make sharing easy. (Check out my comprehensive blog SMO guide for a plethora of tips and tools to get you started.)

To maximize sharing potential, publish new blog content at the start of the day and socially promote it immediately. Date posted plays a critical role in social shares. Share-savvy folks hunger for hot, fresh content… NOT day-old blog bread. Leverage super early publishing times to maximize your sharing window. This will also allow more shares to accrue on social sites across time zones improving the chances of being featured as “top [shared] news”.

Promptly submit content to social sharing sites like StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Delicious to jumpstart the up-vote process. Apply categories and tags accordingly to aid visibility. Delicious recommends tags used by other bookmarkers on new bookmarks, so tag your content wisely to feed suggestions with keywords you want others to use.

6. SEO “Social Networking”

If you have great content, look for new ways of promoting it beyond the standard of social posts and submissions. Start by “networking” with and investigating the social-savvy elite that regularly engage with your content.

Who submitted your content to StumbleUpon? Do you know or follow these people? (Folks you follow on StumbleUpon are denoted by the red person icon.) Be watchful of people with high numbers of “Favs”. Visit their profile and determine if they routinely share “your type” of content.

Who bookmarked your content on Delicious? Be mindful of folks using numerous tags. These people likely use Delicious often and need multiple tags to find content. These tags are handy for keyword research too.

Folks using social bookmark/submission sites are likely engaged on other social networks as well – just check their profiles or try their username on other networks. These people are your viral seed planters. Find them, follow them, connect with them, and retweet their content. When you have new content ready to post, notify them. Do this sparingly though. Don’t take advantage of the relationship, and be prepared to reciprocate in sharing their quality content.

Do You Feel Stronger in the Force?

Which of these tips might you pursue? How are you managing to resist the temptation of black hat SEO? If you’re compelled to defend the SEO Jedi Order, share this post! Add your feedback, success story, favorite link bait example, or newly selected SEO lightsaber color badge (just paste the HTML) in the comments below!

Register now for SES London 2012, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place 20-24 February, 2012. SES Conference Expo features presentations and panel discussions that cover all aspects of search engine-related promotion. Hurry, early bird rate expires February 3!

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2135348/6-SEO-Jedi-Tactics-to-Try-Before-Turning-to-the-Dark-Side

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Happy New Year. This is the first Whiteboard Friday of 2012, and today we’re talking about anchor text, which could seem like a basic topic. But, in fact, there are a lot of intricacies that we should cover. Let’s get right to them.

What I have drawn here is a web page, and it says, “I just found this great website on Portuguese cooks. You should check it out.” Now, this, this text in blue with the underline, that links somewhere, and that link points to another page. Let’s say it’s a page over here, a very nice page on Portuguese cooks. It has some pictures on it. I don’t know what it’s got.

What it’s saying to the engines is not only eye this page and this website, I’m voting for this other page over here, and I want to pass over some PageRank and link juice. I want to pass over trust. I want to pass over the domain diversity, whatever the signals, the keyword agnostics signals are, but I also want to say that I particularly like this web page about Portuguese cooks. That’s what I think you, search engine, should interpret and take away from it.

Of course, this anchor text with the keyword embedded in it becomes a very strong signal to search engines, and as we all know, this is one of the strongest signals that Google and Bing interpret, Bing maybe even stronger than Google. Because of this, lots of people go down a path of trying to acquire links that say the precise keyword that they want.

Of course, this is a challenge because most natural links on the Web don’t generally do this. They will say things like your brand name. They might say something about your site. They might use your personal name, if they’re linking to a blog or something. But it’s rare, it’s uncommon that they might say “Audi 87 engine parts for sale” or “best deals on holiday gifts.” These types of anchor texts, the things that people search for, longer phrases, in particular, are very hard to get as natural links, and this is one of the biggest reasons that gray and black hat SEO exist because manipulating the search engines by acquiring lots of links that have these keyword matches pointing to your page can, in fact, do a great job of ranking you up, at least temporarily until the engines catch up and do something bad to you or to the people linking to you.

What I want to cover is some intricacies around this, some details that you may or may not know about anchor text, and those include: Number one, multiple anchors from the same page “do not” provide more value. What I mean by this is if this page said I just found this great website on Portuguese cooks, you should check it out and a bunch of other text, and then it said Portuguese cooks again and linked over to this page, not helpful. It does not add additional value. There is no reason that you should be going, “Oh man, I wish I could get four anchor text match links from this web page.” No, that’s not going to help you.

Multiple web pages will help you, but if they’re from the same domain, that’s not nearly as valuable as if they’re from different domains. That leads us to the next thing, diversity of anchor text, diversity of the source. The root domain source of the anchor text links provides the strongest benefit, meaning if you can get lots and lots of websites, not just individual web pages but different unique web domains, linking to you saying “Portuguese cooks,” chances are good this web page will do very well.

Number three, the fluctuating anchor text. This is something that people talk about all the time. They don’t just talk about diversity of the link location across different domains, but they talk about diversity of anchor text itself, meaning, “Oh, I should have one that says Portuguese cooks and one that says Portuguese cooking and one that says cooks from Portugal. I’m going to vary up the anchor text a lot.”

I’m a little skeptical about this, not because it’s not potentially useful, and it should be a natural thing if you’re going out and doing white hat types of link building and inbound marketing. But because the primary reason I think most SEOs do this is so as to not trigger pattern matching problems in the engines, meaning if every website that’s linking to me says Portuguese cooks, that’s suspicious, highly suspicious. That suspiciousness is the feature that people are trying to prevent.

So, I’m not so sure whether this fluctuation is all that important unless you’re doing manipulative types of link building, in which case SEOmoz is not all that helpful for you. So, you’re probably not watching this video.

Number four, the first anchor text in the HTML of a page is what Google counts, Bing as well. This was discovered on SEOmoz a couple of years ago. We ran some tests about it. We published the results. There was a lot of skepticism. I think Debra Mastaler from Alliance-Link wrote about it and said, “Hey, Matt Cutts, would you please confirm this?” And he did. He came out and said, “Yeah, that’s how we interpret it”.

So, basically, here’s what’s going on. If you see a web page and it says this website is awesome, it features highlights of great Portuguese cooks, now look, these two links are both pointing to the same page. I don’t know why my handwriting is so terrible in 2012. I hope that repairs itself soon. That means not that the website is going to get credit for the anchor text website and the anchor text Portuguese cooks, but rather they are going to consider the anchor text website and ignore Portuguese cooks.

It’s very frustrating, and something that you should think about when you’re doing internal linking and you say, “Oh, yeah, we should optimize this link.” If it’s already in your menu, if it’s already at the top of the page somewhere in a side bar and that’s higher up in the HTML code, then that is what the engine is going to count. So, do be aware of that and same goes for anything that you’re earning externally. If you’ve got the optimized anchor text for your website in the footer of the blog post where it talks about the author, Rand Fishkin is the CEO of SEOmoz, an SEO tools company, but I’ve already link to SEOmoz’s home page somewhere in the blog post above, that “SEO tools company,” that’s not going to help anything. That’s going to be discounted by the engines.

Number five, internal anchor text, meaning anchor text that comes from your own site, your own pages, it does help. It helps a tiny bit. You can see a little bit of benefit from that. I wouldn’t focus on it too much because tiny is a small amount. That’s probably the most obvious statement I’ve ever made on Whiteboard Friday. But nevertheless, tiny, small amount, therefore don’t focus too much energy on this. Link naturally, internally. Link in such a way that people think your site is good, and, yeah, if you can work in your anchor text, great.

External anchor text is where it really helps, meaning websites that are not your own linking to you. That’s where you really get value from anchor text, and you do need to worry about this a little bit. There should be some manual efforts, some efforts, whether that’s guest posting and blogging, whether that’s sponsoring an event, whether that’s getting your biography featured or something like that, getting a badge embedded somewhere or a graphic embedded somewhere that links back to you in a certain way, you do need that anchor text link match. So, working on at least a little of that external anchor text is definitely worthwhile.

Number six, if a link uses an image, like this, so check out this awesome site on Portuguese cooks, and then here’s a little screen shot of the Portuguese cooks website, and this is linking over. I tried to illustrate that in blue. This does not have any anchor text. It’s an image. So what could the anchor text possibly be?

The answer is they use the Alt attribute. The engines use the Alt attribute that becomes the anchor text usually, not always. If there is no Alt attribute, sometimes they’ll use something like the surrounding text, and you can sort of see and feel that association. Sometimes, they’ll use page titles. Sometimes, they won’t use anything, but they’ll have weaker signals from those other areas of the page, that kind of thing.

If you are embedding images and you’re linking back to yourself or you’re getting links from somewhere or you’re linking out to someone, you want to help them out, use good Alt attributes that describe the page that you’re linking to. This is a great best practice just in general for screen readers and usability reasons. It’s also good for search engines.

Then finally, number seven, no surprise, surrounding text can matter as well. Just as in this example where we said, “Hey, Portuguese cooks is mentioned right before the image,” the engines may be using surrounding text of an anchor, particularly where the anchor itself doesn’t have much value or context.

If something says, “Click here, you’ll find some great information about Portuguese cooks,” the engines might sort of glance around the page and look at the sentence, parse the paragraph, try and understand, “Hey, what do you think they’re talking about here? What seems relevant?” This is one of the reasons why you can see that people who have earned not necessarily great anchor text can rank very well for keywords because it’s often talked about. That topic is talked about when their website is talked about, and it becomes a brand association thing. It becomes a contextual association thing. This is a helpful thing to think about if you are earning links and you can’t control the anchor text. Maybe, at least, you can get them to mention what you do somewhere near the link.

All right, everyone. I hope this edition of Whiteboard Friday has been helpful. I look forward to discussing more details about anchor text in the comments and hope to see you again all next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Happy New Year! Take care.

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/rVeCYIg7LRc/all-about-anchor-text-whiteboard-friday

Article by Axandra SEO software

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we’re talking about advanced on-page optimization. Specifically, I have five tactics for you that go beyond the traditional “I’m going to put my keyword in the title tag. I’m going to put my keyword in the URL”, those kinds of things.

First one, starting out is this idea of semantic connectivity. We talked about this in the past. We did some research a couple of years ago, maybe 18 months ago on LDA, which is latent Dirichlet allocation, which, of course, is a form of topic modeling that we suspected Google might be using.

It’s a way to imagine the connections between words in a particular language. I’ll give you an example. Here is the word “cat”, and the word “cat” is probably closely related to the word “feline”. If you were a search engine and you saw a document with the word “cat” and the word “feline,” you would think that document is more relevant to a query for the word “cat” than a document that has the word “cat” and the word “whiteboard,” which maybe that would be very far away.

Here’s cat and here’s canine. Those are much more distant, but cat is relatively closer to tiger, but it’s even a little closer to meow. So, you get this sense of, ah, the search engines have a graph of all the words in a language set, how they’re connected to each other, what’s relevant to what, phrases not just individual words but the two or three or four word phrases.

This kind of thing can be very helpful if you’re looking at a document and you’re saying to yourself, “Boy, I talked about cats, but I forgot to mention anything about what they eat or what family they’re in or what they’re related to. I didn’t even use the word ‘pets.’ Maybe, I should be optimizing for those types of things.” Employing those closely connected terms can help to boost the relevancy and help boost your rankings.

Second thing on the list, block level optimization. There is a great YOUmoz post about this that we promoted to the main blog recently talking about precisely this type of thing where search engines will essentially analyze individual portions of a page. They’ll look at, oh, here’s a sidebar and we’ve decided that’s not really relevant because that’s navigational links or here’s the top nav. We’re not going to analyze that for relevancy as much potentially. We’re going to look at the header of the document, where the headline is, those first few sentences. We’re going to look at the middle of the document, maybe in paragraph forms, the footer of the document, the end. Are all of those things talking about the topic? Are they all on the subject, or is this something that starts out talking about tigers, but it eventually gets into a discussion on genetically modified foods? If that’s the case, maybe it’s less relevant to tigers. It’s just that the initial headline looked like it was relevant to tigers, and so therefore, we don’t want to rank this document for the word, tigers. We might even want to be ranking it for something like genetically modified foods. It just happens to use that catchy title.

So, make sure that your document . . . do this kind of check for all of these sections, making sure that they’re pertinent, that they’re relevant to the content of the query, that they’re serving the visitor’s interests and needs. If you have that kind of off topic diatribe, and I’m not saying you can’t go off topic in your writing a little bit and explore some storyline themes, particularly if you have a long expository piece or you’re writing a narrative blog post. That’s great. I’m just saying, for stuff that is hyper targeting a particular keyword, especially for a commercial intent or a navigational intent, this might not be ideal. You might want to make those more focused.

Number three, internal and external links. I’m not talking about the links pointing to the page. I’m talking about the links that actually exist on the page. You remember some folks from Google have actually in the past said that, yeah, we might have some things, some first order or second order effect things in our algorithm that rewards people who link out, meaning link to other websites.

Marshall Simmons from The New York Times was on a Whiteboard Friday a couple of years ago, and Marshall talked about how when The New York Times changed their policy to put more external links on the page off to other websites, they actually saw increases and boosts in rankings from the articles that did that, strongly confirming what Google had said about there being some sort of effect in the algorithm, maybe not directly but indirectly looking at, hey, is this person linking out or are they linking out to good places? If they are, we might want to reward them.

Another optimization tactic that’s on the more advanced side is putting good external links referencing relevant, potentially useful content on your pages. Linking out to other people is a wonderful thing too, because it puts you into the ecosystem. What I mean by that is if you link to someone else, other people go and visit that page. They might be talking about it. They might thank you for the reference. Someone might see that on Twitter. They might look in their analytics and see that you’ve sent visitors over and come check out your page and then link to something you’ve done. That reciprocation is very, very powerful in the organic web, and it can be useful, not only for this direct relevancy boosting signal, but also from a links perspective, from a traffic perspective.

Number four on the list, the happiness of visitors to a page. I know what you’re thinking. It’s sort of like, wait a minute, that’s not on-page optimization. That’s more like conversion rate optimization. Yes, but it matters for rankings because Google is looking so much at usage and user data.

I’m going to ask Kenny, who’s filming this video, going to wave, Kenny? That’s a great wave. Did you all see that? He looked great. It’s amazing. I’ll ask Kenny to put in a link to a Quora thread where a Google engineer, somebody who worked at Google, actually talked about how they use machine learning on user and usage data signals in the potential ranking algorithm to help better stuff come up when the rankings may be ordered normally just by their classic on-page link stuff and these types of things.

That means that if I can make visitors happier, if I can boost the value of what they’re getting out of the pages, I can potentially rank higher too, not just convert more of them but even improve in rankings.

We were talking about things like: Are these visitors completing actions? Are they spending more time on this site or page on average with a good experience than they are with others? What I mean by this is it’s not just, “Oh, my time on site is low. I need to find ways to keep visitors on there a longer time.” Maybe, you have something that’s answering a very, very short query in a short amount of time, and that’s making visitors happy. And, maybe, you have something that’s answering that query but after a long period of time, visitors are actually unhappy and they’re going back to Google and clicking, you know what, block all results from this site, I don’t want to see it any more. Or they see you in the rankings in the future, and they’re like, “Oh, I remember that domain. I do not want to go through that again. They had those annoying ads and the overlays, and they blocked me from going there.”

Every time I see Forbes, I was like, “Man, does this article look interesting enough to me to have to go through that initial screen of the ad, because I know I’m going to get it every time, and it’s going to take extra time to load?” On my phone when I’m browsing the Web, I’m always like, “I’m not going to click on that Forbes link. Maybe I’ll check it later on my laptop or my desktop.”

Those types of things are signals that the engines can look at. Are people coming back? Are they returning again and again? When they see this stuff, true they’ve got 25% market share with Chrome. They’ve got the Google tool bar. They have Google free Wi-Fi. They have relationships with ISPs. So, they can get this data right about where everyone goes, not just from search but all over the Web. They know what you’re bookmarking. They know what you’re returning to. They know your visit patterns. This kind of stuff is definitely going to make its way into the algorithm, I think, even more so than it does today.

Fifth and finally, some content uniqueness and formatting. So, you’re all aware of duplicate content issues, thin content issues, and the Panda stuff that happened earlier this year that affected a lot of websites. What you may not know is that there are a bunch of tactics that you can apply in an advanced on-page optimization scenario that can help, so things like completely unique. When I say “completely unique,” what I mean is not that you can’t quote someone in here, but just that what you can’t have is a mad lib style SEO where you’ve got XY blank Z blank ABC blank, and it’s fill in the city name, fill in the proper name, fill in the name of the business, and that’s the same across every page on your site, or that’s taken from a manufacturer’s description and that’s put in there.

You need to have that uniqueness throughout, and Google is very good at shingling, which is sort of a method for pattern detection inside topics or inside content. Don’t play with them. Just make sure that this is a highly unique piece. If you want to quote something, that’s fine. If you want to use media or graphics from somewhere else, that’s fine and reference those. I’m not talking about that, but I am talking about that sort of playing mad libs SEO is a dangerous game.

We’ve noticed that longer content, more content is literally quite well correlated with better rankings, particularly post Panda. What you saw is that sites. I’ll give you an example. I look at a lot of rankings for restaurant sites, because I’m constantly doing searches for restaurants and types of food because I travel a ton. What I see is that Yelp and Urban Spoon do very, very well. City Search often does well, and then you’ll see those independent, individual blogs. When they tend to rank well, when they’re on page one is when they’ve written that long diatribe exploring all sorts of things on the menu with lots of pictures of the food, an experiential post versus a short snippet of a post. You’ll find those on page three, page four, page five. They don’t do as well. That longer in- depth content, more of the uniqueness, more value in the content, more than I can get out of it as a reader seems to be something that Google is picking up on. I don’t know if that’s pure length. I don’t know if that’s something necessarily they’re looking at in the user and usage data, but it could be helpful if you’re not ranking very well and you’re thinking, boy, I have a lot of pages that are just short snippets. Maybe I’m going to try expanding some of them.

Using images in media, we’ve, of course, seen the correlation with alt attributes matching the keyword and images. That’s not what I’m talking about necessarily, but using images on the page can create more of that in- depth experience and can create a better relationship between you and the visitor. Those things could be picked up and used in other places, and then they’ll link back to you. There are all sorts of benefits.

User generated content, so getting comments and interaction down here at the bottom, that type of stuff often is an indication in search engines that, hey, people really care about this. It’s also an addition to the amount of content, and it tends to be very unique and valuable and useful. It uses those words that people on the Web would be using about the topic, and that can again be helpful for your content optimization.

Then, finally, Google is clearly looking at things like reading level and correctness of grammar and spelling. There’s now a filter inside Google. If you click on the advanced search in the little gear box on the top right- hand corner of your screen when you’re logged into Google, you can see advanced search. When you click that, there’s a reading level filter to say, “Only show me content that’s 12th grade and above.” Clearly, Google has that ability.

What I’m saying here is that your content formatting, the way you’re putting things together, the length of the document, the in-depthness, and the correctness, these can all have an impact. Don’t just be thinking about keyword stuffing and using a few keywords here and there and putting it in the title at the front. Be thinking a little bit more broadly about your on- page optimization. You might get more benefits than even doing some link building, sometimes.

All right, everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we will see you again next week. Take care.

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/FuU_phKmnTk/advanced-onpage-optimization-whiteboard-friday