One of the main tools in the arsenal of an SEO practitioner are the posts on external blogs, which when done right offer both a contextual link to a URL of your choice on what are often great quality sites, as well as some genuinely interesting, useful or persuasive  text. Often however, the quality of the writing is overlooked either because of a propensity towards quantity over quality – which at the extreme end of the scale leads to automatically spun articles which are unintelligible to human eyes – or because authors fail to draw a distinction between the thorough and lengthy discourse through which their respective qualifications were earned, and the short but insightful prose that characterises good web copy.

SEOs will spend a large portion of their time writing copy for various purposes, including but not limited to search optimised press releases – either in tandem with or independent of traditional/standard releases – the external blog posts mentioned above and also any optimised on-page content, which as well as making Google’s bots happy needs to be useful to users as well. Making the copy functional and easy to read should also in theory increase traffic, metrics and ultimately the usefulness of the link.

What Makes Good Web Copy?

The watchword when writing for the web is brevity; don’t use 5 words when 1 will do, as users’ time online is already saturated with paragraph after paragraph of written text surrounded by a cavalcade of other  media all vying for their attention and cash.

One way to get information across to readers as quickly as possible is to take a leaf out of journalism’s book and execute the ‘inverted pyramid’, again a technique at odds with the academic style of writing that most professionals will be familiar with. Instead of writing in what some might call a more logical format i.e. setting out the premise, making several points and then coming to a conclusion, inverted pyramid writing suggests that articles should be written with the most important information at the start, leading on to less important and background information further on in the text. The practice originates from early newsrooms, where articles that went over on word-count were literally ‘cut’ from the bottom upwards before being placed in the press for printing. This meant that writers had to fit in all the vital information early, so that  if copy was cut from the bottom – or in our case busy web users only read a small section before moving on – readers still get the most amount of pertinent information wherever they dropped out of the article.

The agency will be busy reviewing keywords, looking for link opportunities, analysing your competitors and going through your site with a fine-toothed comb trying to identify any issues that could potentially hold you back. What though can you, as a client do to help you achieve the best results possible from your campaign? There are actually a number of things which won’t take up too much of your time but should have a positive effect.

Be Mindful of Link Opportunities from Existing Partners

Existing relationships can be great for acquiring links. I’m not saying that you should pick up your phone right now and start ringing everybody in your address book begging them for links but try to keep in mind when speaking with customers and suppliers that links from their website could benefit your own site and business.

Why is this Important?

Have you installed computer equipment in a school or built a fence for a university for example? If so then you could potentially gain a link from a .gov.uk or .ac.uk website. These domains generally carry a lot of authority so links from them could be of high value.

Don’t be Tempted to Buy Links

$20 may sound like a great deal for 5,000 links but take it from me – it generally isn’t!

Why is this Important?

Not only will you violate Google’s guidelines but those types of links are generally of low quality and could do more harm than good. Stick to obtaining links from partners who want to link to you and don’t request payment.

Notify Your SEO Company BEFORE Making any On-Page Changes

On-going development is part of most website strategies and we would always recommend that your content is fresh and up to date. However, problems start to arise when you make structural changes, add new pages or update/remove old ones.

Why is this Important?

You think your main navigational menu looks a bit boring so decide to spruce it up a little. Your developer redesigns it, implements it and it all looks great. Before long your rankings begin to slip and everybody wonders why. It turns out that your developer has made the new menu using a script that search engine spiders can’t read. All of a sudden your most authoritative page (the home page generally) is no longer passing link juice to deeper pages therefore your competitors overtake you in the SERP’s for certain keywords.

When adding new pages always speak with your SEO company and take their advice first. Your new page may be accidently optimised for a term already being targeted elsewhere on the site. If you decide you want to remove an old page, again check with your agency as that page may be ranking well for a keyword which is driving traffic and to retain this traffic the page should stay live.

Implement the Changes your SEO Company Recommends

If you are paying for link building and on-page advice then to get the most out of your budget you should implement any recommendations the SEO company make. If you don’t agree with anything or you think the cost of the development would be too high then pick up the phone and discuss it – the SEO company may be able to prioritise the recommendations and give you some indication of the difference each one is likely to make.

Why is this Important?

Good on-page optimisation not only allows you to pick up long tail traffic, it helps to get the best from the external links that are being built by distributing link juice effectively around the site. Your agency should have solid data to back up any recommendations they make so by not implementing changes they recommend you could be missing out on vital opportunities.

Summary

The main takeaway from this post is to maintain regular contact with your SEO company. They are there to consult and give advice so use them for that purpose and your campaign should benefit. Keep in mind that buying links is bad but obtaining links from sites you have existing relationships with is good and should help towards realising the goals for your site.

One of the most common mistakes that companies make is building a website which is solely in English. If you believe that this is enough for your global business, you are still wandering in an ancient era. More than 70% of the online population of the world does not search in English when using a search engine to find certain products or services. Therefore it is crucial to carry out business in a country in its respective language; otherwise, you might be missing out on a sizable bulk of potential customers. Some agencies will give you the advice to simply add translations and subsides to the English main site. However, this might not only lead to a loss in website traffic, it is also questionable how the potential international customers are going to find your translated website, as it might not appear in their search engines when typing in certain search terms.

The best way would be to built a new site and go for a local domain with a local host location (IP address). In other words, if you are planning to expand to the German market, use a domain which ends in .de, if Spain is the country of your choice, you should go for an .es extension and if you are optimising for France, your domain should end in .fr and so forth. Having said this, it is important to mention, that websites can also be ranked without having a local extension, but using a local domain makes it easier, as the Search Engines are always trying to rank the most relevant indexed web content for search results and with a local domain your site appears more authentic to local language searchers. It is worth knowing is that sometimes it is essential that the company is represented in the respective country, in order to get a local domain, for example in Germany.

Once you have chosen your domain, to the next thing to consider is the content of the page. This is where the next pitfall awaits a lot of businesses. Some companies merely make use of translation software systems or somebody who is not native to that country and is only aware of the fundamentals of that language. The understanding of the nuances that differentiate the language, is of crucial importance to the translation process.

The differences between French and English, for example, are obvious. However the differences between the French spoken in France in comparison with that which is spoken in Switzerland or Belgium, are less obvious. There are specific facets of multilingual SEO that you have to consider carefully when translating your website into other languages, and this is where native multi-linguists come into play. Translating a website is not just about translating each word from e.g. English into German; it is also about understanding the culture and expectations of the targeted country. Multilingual SEO must be undertaken by considering the online behavioural pattern of people in different regions and countries, otherwise an international campaign is likely to fail.

The language clutter begins when choosing the right keywords. You can observe notable disparities in things like writing, terminology, punctuation, sentence structure, colloquial speech and so forth. But even the same language sometimes differs in writing or terminology, for example Spanish from Spain and Spanish from Latin America, or French from France and Canada or German from Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Henceforth, it is imperative to carry out more systematic investigation on the content and devise strategies accordingly. With respect to a foreign-language website, you must identify the key search terms that are used regionally by Internet users and you should not just directly translate the keywords from your own language, as this might cause misunderstandings or lead to the optimisation of suboptimal keywords. An excellent example is the English term “mobile phone”, which is a term in English search engines with high rankings. A correct German translation of this would be “Mobiltelefon”. However, a lot of Germans would rather type in “Handy” as a search term, as this is what the majority of Germans call a mobile phone. However for other German speaking countries – the term “Mobiltelefon” would not work without its problems; for example in the German speaking part of Switzerland, people call a mobile phone “Natel” and therefore would rather use this as a search term for search engines.

To make matters even more complicated, points and commas of the numerical representation differ within Europe. In the UK the punctuation of the number would be as follows:1,000,000.00. In Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Italy and some other countries, the notation would be exactly the opposite: 1.000.000,00 and some countries, like France and Finland, never use a thousands separator: 1 000 000.00.

It is clear that your website will be ranking higher when you are using the right keywords; hence, the initial research is worthwhile and necessary. Furthermore, a multilingual marketing and localisation strategy should support any international campaign.You should only hire professionally qualified translators who translate into their native language or dialect and ideally have lived in the respective country. This is important so that they understand and can identify cultural differences, as well as inappropriate styles, bad grammar and terminology that will often lose key messages, and shrink the overall trust in  brand.

The native speakers will also be helpful when planning the right online strategy. There is no denying the fact that nearly two-thirds of web users prefer Google to other search engines. Nevertheless, you should also take the remaining one-third into consideration. It means that you have to present your website to other localised search engines as some countries might focus more on other prominent search engines than Google.Iin some countries link building works slightly differently than in others, e.g. it might be harder to get guest posts published or get in contact with bloggers, due to privacy issues, regulations etc.

Notwithstanding, link building is one of the most important parts of SEO and therefore is also very important in multilingual SEO. In order to rank highly in the search engine results, you must try to get as many inbound links from as many local domains as possible. No matter whether blog post, directories, articles, link baits or partner- and sponsorships, it is utterly important to always keep the different culture and writing styles in mind, so that the content and style fits to the target country and hence appears more authentic to local language searchers. Following this strategy also helps search engines to recognise you as a local business and will help to improve your ranking in local search engines, such as the Google.de or Google.co.uk.

In summary there is evidence to say that opting to hire a multilingual SEO company will provide you the chance to successfully and effectively expand into new, international markets. Consequently, think global and act local by embracing this latest concept of targeting multiple languages and making use of native linguists.

Google’s three new features focus around Google+, its relatively new social network that is growing in popularity. Google+ had almost 50 million visits in December 2011 according to Experian Hitwise data – a 55% increase in traffic against November. While uptake hasn’t been as big as it could have been (its more popular amongst the tech and web savvy community) these new changes might tip the balance for Google and encourage more wide spread use of its social network.

Google’s shift is toward personalisation of the search results – and inclusion of Google+ results in searches. If you are logged in, Google will now serve you content that has been shared with you privately, along with matches from the open web in one merged list of results. Results are based on your own behaviour online and the behaviour and content distributed within your social network.

Logged in results will include:

Results from the open web, boosted by your personal behaviour

Results from the internet, boosted by your social connections

Public Google+ posts and photos

Private or “Limited” reach Google+ posts and photos shared with you

Moving forward, this change will make it impossible for businesses using search marketing to ignore the impact Google+ will have on search traffic.

Amit Singhai of Google introduced the update in a blog post, saying:

“We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships.”

“The social search algorithm, and the personal search algorithm, and the personalized search algorithm are actually one algorithm now, and we are merging it in a way that is very pleasant and useful.”

Some feel that being able to search both the public Google network and your own private network at the same time is helpful and would save them time but so far from what I have read – feelings are very mixed.

First let’s look at the new features in a nutshell:

Personal Results Feature

Results will include data that is personal to you and that is pulled from your social connections on Google+. Only you would ever see this set of results, and Google ensures us that private personalised SERPs are well encrypted.

Google+ Profile Inclusion

Google+ profiles will now be available to view via the search engine itself – you no longer need to visit Google+ directly. Profiles will even be available in the autocomplete box that Google provides. If you search for a name, information from your network will be served up first – either people you know or people that Google thinks you should or might know. See below:

Once you have searched for a person, you will have the opportunity to add the users Google returns in the search to your circles from the SERP itself.

People & Places

If you search for a topic of interest and Google+ has relevant profiles or business pages for your search these results will now be displayed on the right hand side of the page.

Currently changes are only rolled out on Google.com and do not extend to the mobile network. So far Google have failed to say whether the changes will roll out on Android devices which account for 50% of smartphone sales worldwide.

Opinions about Google’s changes so far….

One should remember that Google has been publishing personalised SERPs since 2005 however these changes are a little more obvious to people. While only rolled out yesterday – the news has caused a stir in the search marketing industry.

Some are unsure about what Google is trying to achieve and there have been accusations that it is warping search results and boosting the positions of Google+ posts to generate more interest in their own network.

Twitter’s lawyer, Alex Macgillivray, and former Google employee tweeted:

Twitter chose not to renew its contract with Google last year. Google no longer pays for access to its database and Google seemed surprised that Twitter would attack the new changes when it wasn’t prepared to share its data with Google anyway. If Twitter wants to have better coverage online for its breaking news then there has to be give and take. If none of the private social media sites are prepared to share their data then you can to some extent understand why Google has done what it has.

Google’s response on this was:

“Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service… Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”

People searching who are logged in will see significantly less of the general search results and as 90% of click throughs come from page one results – businesses are going to have to work even harder to ensure their website it visible. This in itself is one of the biggest complaints I think – people are worried that the search giant is making it more difficult for businesses to be seen (including businesses like Twitter and Facebook) and this has brought up questions over anti-competitiveness.

Antitrust issues have been floated about online– some search experts feel the decision Google have taken is a mistake – with it only showing a blatant need to promote its own social network. Previously Google would serve only the most relevant content to you – even if it did not have its own content to present it would seek out the most relevant source. Now however, Google will always promote Google+ content over and above natural content if you are logged in and haven’t opted out.

Perhaps ‘Search Plus Your World’ will be the reason that Google’s been looking for get Facebook to share its data with Google. No doubt there will be demand from users in future to include data from sites like Facebook in their personalised results.

See Google’s video introducing the new Social Search and personalised results:

The Potential Impact

Realistically, those marketers who until now have held off on getting up to speed with and using Google+ are going to be at a disadvantage when it comes to advertising their business. With Google+ profiles, and more importantly business pages showing up in search results it is likely that businesses with a business page would get more exposure than they did previously. Even if their website ranks badly, they have a chance to be highly visible in logged in searches if their business page is relevant to the users search. This opens up some opportunities for businesses engaged with Google+ but equally can be a disadvantage to those without a network profile. It could create a surge in signups on Google+ for businesses as they come to realise its new potential impact on natural search. Now is the time to get on board the Google+ train and if your SEO is not up to scratch it’s probably worth considering how this new competition in the SERP’s will affect your traffic.

While many businesses focus on looking after their customers and brand via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn offerings these changes from Google will certainly mean more marketers are forced to look at how they can use Google+ to win more business online.

My Personal Opinion

Gut instinct tells me that while the press hasn’t all been positive about the changes, the actual user experience would be enriched by the change. Only a small percentage (say up to 20%) of searches are likely to be affected – this said however it would depend on the rate of uptake of Google+ moving forward. It’s no surprise to me that search is becoming more social – we have been bombarded with changes over the last few years which have all headed in a social relevance direction. We have long been telling people that social media is a big part of SEO and this will only make it easier to explain why social and SEO are so very closely linked.

Personally, I don’t mind the idea of being able to toggle between search results – it’s actually easier now to completely depersonalise your results than it was before.

We have heard a lot about what other people think but what do you think about the change – will it help or hinder your searches – make them more or less relevant in your opinion? We’d love to hear from you….!

In the increasingly competitive marketplace for online sales and ecommerce, any advantage you can get needs to be fully developed and realised. The same can be said of the reverse, so any advantage your competition uses must be quickly identified and analysed to see if there is any benefit for your business and whether you can/should adopt it.

Enter Google Product Search… a price comparison service from Google that appears within organic search. It has been around since 2007 (after a brand reorganisation, changing it from “Froogle”, the pun of which was thought to not be obvious enough…) but only recently embraced by a majority of ecommerce sellers. So why are more and more companies making use of this service? What exactly is it? And how can you get involved?

What Is It?

Google Product Search offers those with an ecommerce website an opportunity to display specific products within the organic search results under high search volume terms.

As Google puts it, “It provides potential customers an on-hand price comparison service, with searches by keyword, which can then be broken down by category and ordered by price.”

How do you Access it?

As a Google User you can find it either via shopping results as part of the organic search results:

Or via the Google products search page (currently in beta):

As a merchant, access is provided via the Google Merchant Center, where you can upload your product feed to have your products appear here.

Who Needs It?

All ecommerce sites should upload their products to this free service, as it is fast becoming a major source of revenue for those that use it. For example: One major brand has seen over 17 million visits from product searches alone since their first foray into this market in 2010.

How do you Upload a Feed?

• This can be done via your Google Merchant Center account.

• Manual uploads are not best practice.

• Due to the changeable nature of the actual products that are in stock and potential price changes, this should be an automated process.

• In order to save as much time as possible, feed uploads should be in an XML (details here) file hosted on the main domain using a static filename.

• A function can then be built into the CMS whereby you can refresh (or auto refresh) this feed whenever you require or when new products are added or removed.

• This data feed can then be submitted via Google Merchant Center and we can set Google to download its contents on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.

Changes to Google Products Search Policies

As of 22^nd September 2011, Google has revised how it analyses the Google Products pages. There have been additional fields added that are required to fill in, as well as fields that have been streamlined or removed completely.

A look at your product feed is essential to make sure you adhere to these new policies and have all the required information.

Changes to Product Feed Requirements

Retired a number of attributes, including:

• Quantity
• Feature
• Manufacturer
• Genre
• Featured product
• Year
• Author
• Edition

You may still include these attributes in your feed, but the information will not be used in Google Product Search.

Now required:

• Image Attributes – Now Required Worldwide

• Availability Attribute – Now Required in US, UK, Germany and France

• New Google Product Category Attribute – Required for US, UK, Germany, France and Japan

• New Clothing Attributes – Required for US

• New Variant Attributes – Required for variant clothing products in the US

• Prices – The most prominent price on the landing page to be the same price as on Google Product Search.

Data freshness

Additionally, Google has developed what they call ‘Data Freshness’, this concerns itself with the availability, Pricing and General Product Information of each product. If any of these attributes are found to be inaccurate or false, Google will take action against that account. Regular monitoring of availability and any changes in price is vital.

Rankings

The last big question, in what is becoming an increasingly competitive market, is what you can do to help improve the rankings of your products in the product search. Google is understandably murky on this (especially with the new changes being implemented), but here are my top 5 tips to help you rank well.

1. Adhere to the Guidelines

As mentioned previously there are new guidelines in place so you must stick to them rigidly.

2. Keep Data Fresh

Again we’ve mentioned about freshness and this is a major point for Google.

3. Relevancy

Name product titles well, in relation to what users search for.

4. Authority

Encouraging satisfied customers to place reviews on 3^rd party sites. This gives the merchant trust and authority within the products sphere, meaning that Google will be more inclined to search your products opposed to those of a brand new competitor with no history / 3^rd party endorsements (in the form of positive reviews).

5. Competitive Prices

Companies that have better prices in comparison to the competition appear to consistently rank better, with Google seemingly preferring to rank overall by a combination of price, authority and relevance.

So, in order to get the most out of this service and start seeing revenue from it, make sure your files are correct first time, adhere to new regulations and make sure data is fresh.

The speech was on the topic of ‘SEO in 2012 – How to Win in Competitive Markets’ however the format had a twist – in order to keep content interesting and to the point, speakers were only allowed to have 21 slides and only had 21 SECONDS to talk per slide. This was challenging, particularly because Ian had no control of his own slide deck – it was being progressed for him by the organisers! Despite being a challenge to present, we thought this was a great format and one which the audience seemed to really enjoy.

In his talk, Ian covers (very swiftly):

- The history of SEO up to now

- 5 myths about SEO

- 5 Do’s in SEO

- 5 Don’ts for SEO

It’s a great presentation and gives a good overview of some of the worst myths and worst practices in the SEO sector as well as what you can do to get SEO working to your advantage.

Please click the image below to visit the Figaro Digital website where you can watch the full video.

There’s no limit to how much damage a bad customer review can do to a business. A recent study by Fasthosts which quizzed 1,300 British consumers, revealed that a third (33%) of participants and perhaps more startlingly, 52% of under-24’s said that they had left a negative review online of a product or service they had received.

So what’s this got to do with SEO?

Well, it just so happens that a lot of these websites that people complain on tend to be quite well placed in the search engine ranking positions. A bad review can prove near impossible to shift no matter how hard you try to knock it down. Websites such as TripAdvisor, Money Saving Expert and BBC Watchdog carry such high domain authority that they are always likely to be recognised by search engines and rank highly.

The rise of social media can also play a part in this. The amount of shares that a piece of content receives, either through tweets, Google+1’s and so on is also recognised by search engines. The constant evolution of social media is giving consumers more platforms and, in turn, more freedom to express their opinions and grievances.

How can I minimise the damage?

Let’s face it, even the best SEO’s are going to struggle to displace websites with such good domain authority. It’s just not going to happen. It’s very much a case of damage limitation here and common sense says that the first thing you could do is avoid upsetting these customers in the first place. However, for those that have already suffered from bad reviews there are a few ways you can counter-balance them.

Perhaps the simplest way to do this is to try and balance out the negative reviews with positive ones. This does not simply mean creating fake, positive reviews posted under pseudonyms. As tempting as this may be, it is extremely unethical in terms of SEO and a perfect example of “black hat” practice.

A more “white hat”, ethical approach would be to incentivise your customers into leaving a positive review if they are happy with the service they received. This could be in the form of a discount voucher for their next purchase, or a token free gift. Customers who have a bad experience are much more likely to write a review than those who are provided with good service. It’s unfortunate, but that’s just the way it is. As a result of this, sometimes it may be necessary to go above and beyond to ensure that they are inclined to wax lyrical about your company on these sites with high domain authority.

Interact with your customers

Another interesting statistic that can be drawn from the survey is the fact that 84% of participants would actually be willing to forgive the company and try it’s services again, so long as they acknowledged their complaint and engaged with them about it. Unfortunately, similar research into 400 small UK businesses revealed that only 12% had actually discussed an online complaint with the customer.

A great way to appease disgruntled customers and also boost your search ranking positions is through the use of social media. Many companies now choose to interact with customers who speak about them in a less complimentary light on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. I have personally experienced this with Northern Rail and Sky to name just two.

Of course, answering their queries would go some way towards repairing the relationship between consumer and provider. However to get the most out of this, you should point them towards a page on your website which best addresses their requirements. Maybe a help or contact page, or a page for certain products that they may not have been able to find. Social media sharing is having a bigger impact on the world of SEO day by day and you can help yourself by getting your website content out there.

Wikipedia

For millions of people, Wikipedia provides a valuable service every day. For SEO’s however, it can prove to be quite a stubborn block on the road to search marketing success. Outward links from Wikipedia have been “no follow” for a number of years and as a result, the flow of link juice has been stifled.

Another downside to Wikipedia, especially for businesses, is the fact that pages are required to be written from a neutral point of view (in other words, not by a company employee). Whilst in theory this is understandable, this can open a whole can of worms with regards to bad press. A particularly disgruntled customer could potentially air their grievances in the form of a cleverly worded Wikipedia edit (for example, by adding a “controversy”/”scam” segment to the entry) and the company may have no opportunity to defend themselves.

Once again, Wikipedia holds extremely high domain authority, and regularly ranks above most websites (usually in the top five or so) for any keyword. It goes without saying that a bad entry on here will be a costly one for most businesses.

Final Thoughts

It’s an age-old saying that the customer is always right. Whilst this may not always be the case, the customer is king in the sense that without them, you won’t make any money.

The high domain authority that “watchdog” style websites command makes it extremely important to keep the customers on side. Your site is almost certainly going to be seen in a darker light by search engines in comparison so it’s important to do your best to make these customers as happy as possible. If you can end up helping your search engine ranking positions in the process, then why not?

Google currently boasts 90% share of the desktop search environment, and their share of the mobile search market is not too far behind.

With this in mind, Google has announced the following best practice guidelines as to the visibility of websites in the mobile search environment;

Mobile/Desktop Website Redirects

Earlier this year, head of Web Spam at Google, Matt Cutts answered a question relating to redirecting desktop content to similar content displayed on a mobile site. His response was to reiterate that content which is identical across a desktop and mobile site, is not seen as duplicate content, unless the content is not redirected in the correct manner. Google themselves highlight that ‘you can redirect them to the corresponding mobile version of the same page’ and that, ‘Google notices the standard versions of the URL’.

Google uses a separate spider and indexing structure when crawling the mobile environment – known as ‘Googlebot-mobile’. When redirecting a mobile user from a desktop webpage with identical content to the mobile version, Google will understand that one has been designed for desktop, and the other for mobiles. “It’s fine if the content for Googlebot is different from that for Googlebot-Mobile”.

Mobile Search Visibility

Google states that if your website is not visible in the Google mobile search results, your site may have an issue with indexing:

Googlebot must crawl your mobile site before it’s included within the search index. Just like in desktop SEO, a sitemap must be created containing all URL’s within the website. To inform Google of the site’s existence, this must be submitted via Google Webmaster Tools.

Mobile URL’s

When Googlebot-mobile crawls your website, it will check that all URL’s are viewable on a mobile device. Although the website’s URL’s may be indexed within the standard desktop web search, they may not be viewable in mobile search. To ensure that your mobile site is suitable for Google mobile search, the Doc Type Definition of the website must be developed to the recommended format; “We support XHTML basic, XHTML Mobile Profile, WML, and cHTML” Also see Google Mobile Guidelines for more information.

Impact

Social media has been growing in power over the past few years and although it is still unclear how it directly affects your brand page’s SEO, Google and the other major search engines are factoring it in more and more with each algorithm update. I’m sure many of will have noticed that your SERPs are noticeably different when logged in to Google+, as shares and +1s from your connections help to boost certain pieces of content for relevant keywords.

Fundamentally, it is these shares that matter most to those seeking an audience. A post that has been shared numerous times by individuals with large spheres of influence should in theory prove that it is of good quality, interesting or funny. In order to track these interactions, social media platforms Facebook and more recently Google+ now offer updated data services by which users can see a wide range of information about how their content has been shared. Twitter is yet to provide any sort of statistical data but has also received an update to its service over the last few weeks.

However, while it’s interesting and fun to have a look through the numbers and see how your content spreading, there is still some debate as to how useful the data actually is for businesses looking to act upon it. As these new developments have been in place for a few weeks, now would seem an appropriate time to weigh up the pros and cons.

Facebook Insights

There was a big fuss over the last Facebook update. Its complete revamp of the timeline and other user interface properties caused the usual outcry about change and was followed by threats from members about leaving the site. In reality few probably did, especially when those with brands began to explore the new Insights tab on their page. The update allows brands to extract physical data in the form of a .CSV or spread sheet and use it to analyse brand visibility and their ROI.

Page owners are now able to see the demographic of the people that are liking their pages and sharing their posts. Posts can therefore be tailored to the demographic that is interacting on the most regular basis. Conversely, if content that was aimed at one age group is actually being picked up by another, future posts can be adapted. The impact of events that a brand is involved in can be tracked directly via the timeline shown below.

The frequency that people are shown content over the week can also be accessed, which allows the owner to view both unique and previous visitors to the site side by side. This is a distinct improvement in accuracy over their previous service, which only offered one impressions figure. Also the source locations of likes, visits and people talking about your brand have been added. A brand could therefore use this data to geotarget posts for a select group of their audience.

However, for all this useful data, the service lacks the details of actual individuals interacting with your page and how those interactions are then passed on. The nearest you get to this stat is the percentage ‘virality’ of each post. This is an area which Facebook will surely be quick to catch up on, with the potential of the Google+ metrics system being realised.

Google+ Ripples

As noted by Casey on the SEOmoz blog last week, Google+ Ripples feature went largely unnoticed when it was launched almost three weeks ago. However on closer inspection, it becomes apparent that this is a tool that brand owners and social media execs should not be overlooking. Just like a dropping a stone in a pond, Google+ tool places the source at the centre of a visualisation and then displays how the content spreads throughout the social network in real time.

Let’s take this post by Will Wheaton on the eviction of Occupy from New York’s Zuccotti Park. Its Ripples page can be seen below, accessible on G+ by clicking the drop down menu to the right of the post itself. The most recent and total number of shares statistics can be seen at the top left, above the visualisation. The graphic itself shows how the post has been shared via arrows to each user doing the sharing. Circles around the arrowheads indicate that particular user has a sphere of influence that people within his connection group are sharing the same post within. You can zoom in on each of these sections to see the individuals within these groups.

Below is a very cool time line feature, which allows you to playback the sequence in which the post was shared and a graph showing the peaks and troughs of sharing frequency over time. Finally, you can see the main influencers, i.e. users with most re-shares, a few stats on how the post spread and the different languages it was shared in.

There are currently a few limitations to the Ripples feature though, detailed by Ryan Crowe. First off, the post has to be public in order for you to view its Ripples. They also only date back to August 31^st at the moment and you can only access the Ripples of a post if it has been publicly re-shared once. You are able however, to re-share a Ripples page by linking to it.

The main advantage of this Google+ feature for businesses over Facebook Insights is obviously the ability to view the individual main influencers of content. Brands producing content can actively hunt for shares via certain highly influential users. If they don’t already have a connection with the individual they can look to build a relationship with someone who is active within the desired user’s group of connections. This could be done through LinkedIn or any other contact info on their page.

Conclusions

In short, Google+ appears to have one-upped Facebook Insights in terms of how actionable the data is, although it does lack a downloadable option. Whilst brand owners have been able to track social interactions via Google Analytics for some time, these new updates have opened the door for increasingly targeted social activities.  As social media becomes more and more influential to SERPs, brands will need to be completely switched on to maximise their impact.

The phrases  ‘produce great content’ and ‘content is king’ will be familiar to anyone who has done some research into SEO,  but as advice goes, “produce great content” is so open ended its almost useless. It’s like telling pop singers they need to “sing great songs”, true, but not really helpful. What the singer needs to know is how to write and sing a great song.  With the great content question further complications are added by the sheer number of things that are included under the label of content. Videos, articles, and songs are all examples of content – as indeed would any piece of information be.

There are two reasons you want great content on your site, (well three, but pride doesn’t make you money). The first is so that people will find your site interesting and trustworthy, so that they do what you set up your site to do. (If it’s a humour site they will laugh, if it’s a banking site they will set up an account and so on). The second is so that these people will post links to your website, boosting your position in the search rankings and bringing yet more people to your website.

So what is great content?

Well, frustratingly the answer is ‘it depends’. From an SEO perspective it is content that the audience engages with. Is a photograph of a cat in a funny pose with a misspelled caption great content? Probably not for banking websites, but it has proved lucrative for Icanhazcheesburger.com. I’ll admit that a lot of people will deny that lolcats are great content, but the problem for them is that I’m not talking about great art. (Whether lolcats count as great art I’ll leave to someone considerably braver than me to tackle.) The point here is that if I go to a banking site then I want content on finance, savings and so on. If I go to a fashion website I want to know about the latest trends or what the celebrities are wearing.

So great content is information that serves a website’s readership?

Well that’s certainly part of it. If your content isn’t relevant then it’s just going to disappoint people. If you post your funny cat video on your banking website then at best it will be ignored at worst it will confuse people. But it isn’t going to be enough. Most webmasters do a fairly good job of keeping their sites on topic, and while articles on insurance might be relevant to your banking site, they are unlikely to appeal to enough people to count as truly great content.

So what more do I need?

Well here is where it all gets a bit tricky. If we take those insurance articles I mentioned earlier then there are several things you can do with them that will make them more appealing:

• Don’t write them ‘because you need content’ rather write them because you think that they will be genuinely useful for your readers. A great example of this is the SEOmoz blog.

• Make content easy to read on a screen (and a mobile device or tablet) by including lots of white space and clear segmentation allowing readers to scan the content.

• Spellcheck and proof read everything!

• Produce original content, i.e. don’t just rehash several other people blog posts, instead try to put your own spin on it.

• Write in your natural voice. If you are overly formal or dry your articles won’t be very appealing. A conversational tone not only makes them easier to read, but also to write.

Of course many of these guidelines only apply to written content but here is the essential problem. Whether content is great or not will always be a bit hit and miss. If you produce good content, regularly then you will start to get a feel for what makes great content for your site.

So how do I know if I’ve got great content?

How does your audience react to it? Do you get a lot of people commenting, sharing and linking to it? If you do then it is probably great content. But more than that; look at who reacts to it. I’m sure that your friends and family are all impeccable judges, but it might just be possible that they are little biased when asked to assess your work. The reaction of your customers and critics is likely to be both more reliable and painful. See what they are saying about you on Twitter and in the comments section.

So I’d say don’t worry about producing great content. Produce relevant, interesting and original information and see if people think it is great. Listen to your critics, and never stop trying.