I don’t of course mean stop optimising completely, that would be silly! I mean slow down optimisation in some areas and speed it up in others to get the most from the resources you have available. It’s what I like to call ‘seasonal SEO’.

Let’s pretend you run an online shop which sells outdoor and camping gear. Some of your keywords might include terms like ‘tents’, ‘wellington boots’ and ‘camping stove’ so you perform the usual tasks – make sure you have relevant pages for each term, ensure those pages are highly optimised then go out there and build some links to those pages by creating some useful and exciting content. You really want to rank well for all 3 terms so 33.33% of your time is dedicated to building links for each of the 3 phrases.

The thing is, it’s May and you’re not yet ranking close to the first page for the term ‘camping stove’. Now is a good time to head over to Google Insights.

Insights was used to identify seasonal search trends for the keyword ‘camping stove’. The orange dot shows the traffic data for May and the maroon dot shows the peak of this traffic in August. Now, if you were ranking on the second page of Google, May would still be slightly too late to start optimising because ideally you want to be sitting in a strong position on page 1 by now ready for the rising traffic levels over the next few months. As I mentioned above though you’re not currently ranking close to page 1 and have a lot of work to do. With this in mind then, when should you start optimising? There are a number of factors to consider here, some of which are detailed below:

- The link building resources you have available to target this particular term

- The competition surrounding the SERP

- The value of the term – is this a ‘vanity term’ or do you have a large product inventory and ranking well will provide real value to your business

If you have reasonable resources available and the SERP is quite competitive then I’d say February would be a good time to start optimising. This would give you 3 months to get some good links and hopefully rank somewhere near where you need to be. You should start to think about ramping up the effort at the beginning of April.

If we look at the keyword ‘tents’, summer time seems to be a period of high search activity whereas activity for the term ‘wellington boots’ in the same period is low. We can compare the search volumes in Google Insights.

The blue line shows tent trends and the red line wellington boots.

So what do you do with this data? You produce an area of focus calendar:

Building this out to include all of your product types can give your SEO campaigns real direction. You could go a level deeper and produce calendars for product styles (4 man tents? Gas camping stoves?).

Head over to Google Insights and have a play, you just might be surprised at what you could uncover!

According to Google:

“We’re making improvements to our exact and phrase matching options so your ad will be eligible to show when people search for close variants — yes, that includes misspellings — of your keywords. In addition to misspellings, other close variants include singular and plural forms, acronyms, stemmings (such as floor and flooring), abbreviations, and accents”.

Google has stated that this alteration is to improve ad targeting by “helping to improve clicks and impressions”.

To provide clarity, Google gives the following example:

As indicated in the example, the essence of the match types remains the same – no additional words allowed for exact match; no (major) disruption or reversal of the phrase for phrase match.  If someone misses an “n” here or adds an extra “p” there, no disaster, your keywords will trigger. At face value, that’s quite a reasonable step.

I’ve never been a fan of misspellings as keywords.  Given the infinite number of ways a word or phrase can be mistyped, I usually match some and sweep the rest up with broad matches.

However, there are a couple of scenarios where showing on a typo may not be particularly beneficial.  Often it’s pretty easy to discern the intention of a typo.  As shown in Google’s example, “tennis” with an “n” missing still pretty much looks like “tennis”.

On other occasions though, a typo can lead to a completely different word.  An example would be “trial” and “trail”.

I searched “trials bike” and “trails bike”.  It looks like these two words are somewhat interchangeable although it also looks like a “trials bike” relates more to a BMX-like pedal bike and a “trails bike”, a scrambler motor bike.  As a vendor of either of those two machines, there may be value to advertising on both those keywords.  Nevertheless, I suspect there is a click-through and a conversion rate difference between the two words, depending on the type of bike being sold.

As a result of this likely conversion rate difference, an advertiser would set a particular CPC for “trials bike” and a different one for “trails bike”.  As long as both keywords were exact match, the previous system would separate the traffic.

The new system threatens to remove that separation, merging all searches to one keyword and diluting the conversion stats.

Moving away from misspellings, similar problems could be encountered when “plurals, stemmings, acronyms and abbreviations” are served up to exact match keywords.

An example I’m familiar with occurs with the keyword “video conferencing”.  Having worked with video conferencing keywords, I know for a vendor of video conferencing equipment, the conversion stats for “video conferencing” are much stronger than the conversion stats for “video conference”.  The only difference between these keywords, though, is the stemming – a factor to be merged by the new format.

Another example considers singulars versus plurals.  Here are some fictional data for a company that sells home canopies:

There will be a number of factors determining why the [canopies] performs better than [canopy].  The key point here is that the performance is different so the words should be treated differently.  Unfortunately, the new matching criteria risks these differences being lost.

It is also interesting to look at the stats relating to the misspelling.  A lot less traffic but how strong a performance by comparison?  I imagine the better performance may be due to less advertisers targeting the misspelling thereby give our ads a less competitive landscape from which to benefit.  With the match-change, Google need no longer worry about these searches triggering reduced competition response pages – what a happy accident…!

To be fair to Google, it has not made the new matching system mandatory and there’s and opt-out at campaign level.

Google also states that when calculating keyword Quality Score it will discount the performance of the variant matches.  That’s nice to hear I suppose, although for me it doesn’t make Quality Score any more fathomable.

I’m interested to know whether these amendments impact exact/phrase match negatives.  I would imagine the changes will not be implemented for those keywords or things could get very messy.  Some clarification on this would be good, though.

Leading on from this, using exact/phrase match variation, could particular exact match variations be countered by the use of negatives?  I would imagine that would be possible although it would require greater administration than currently required.

The Good Stuff

Up to this point I’ve been looking at the match-type change in a fairly negative light; muddied search terms; greater admin to counteract it; suspicions of Google channelling traffic to keywords for less than altruistic reasons. To some extent this is all valid.  However, there is one potentially excellent benefit to the match type change:

Say we create a campaign exclusively for our top performing, exact match keywords.  Each keyword has an ad group to itself so we can target the ads to optimum effect.  We opt out of the variation matching so using exact matching in its original form. We then create a duplicate account.  This campaign we opt in to variation match.  We then add the exact match keywords from the first campaign as exact match negatives to the new campaign… What we will be left with is a nearly-exact-match, top performers campaign to run alongside our absolute-exact-match, top performers campaign.  By doing this we will cover all likely typos but without the wider variation we risk with broad matching.

Because of the narrowness of the variation, the nearly-exact-match campaign should reach a similar level of performance to the exact match campaign.  The performance would certainly be stronger than any attempt to create a similar campaign with existing match types. Were we to try and do so with standard exact match we’d never cover all typos and would probably lose a lot of keywords to “low search volume”.  Were we to use broad match, the variation would be too great irrespective of the number of negatives used.

As with many things, there are pros and cons to the match-type change.  To date, one thing you could rely within AdWords was that an exact match keyword matched a search term exactly.  The match type adaption removes this certainty. As a result, if we continue to manage AdWords campaigns without taking this into account, we run the risk of allowing miscalculations to creep in. However, as outlined above, this matching adaption also provides an opportunity to better performance.

Google has made a lot of changes over the years.  It can often be easy to dismiss some changes in fairly cynical terms.  Google will amend the system to increase its efficiency and its profitability.  AdWords changes force advertisers to adapt and those who don’t usually end up losing money.  And yet these changes create opportunity.  Those who adapt have the potential to benefit.  I very much believe that the match type chance creates just such an opportunity.

This morning I attended a particularly impressive speech from social media guru Martin Thomas, the author of ‘Loose’ and co-author of ‘Crowd Surfing’. The event was hosted by our partners at Finn PR.

Martin spoke about Social Media and how the main challenge for businesses is not the technology involved – it is the cultural and organisational change that comes with being social. His ethos is that before a company can leverage social media successfully it has to ‘loosen up’ and start a culture shift (from the top down). Martin describes four main drivers for why businesses need to change their approach:

1 | Chaos and Complexity in the World – The world is no longer highly structured and organised.  Sir Martin Sorrell said “the 21^st Century is not the place for tidy minds” and his words are true. There is no space for control freaks.

2 | New Forms of Organisation – Organisations today are less structured and rigid than they were in the past. Martin’s example was Wiki Leaks – no staff, no offices yet it is a hugely powerful and influential organisation!

3 | Generational Shift -The generations entering the workplace today have a different mind-set. Not only are they more tech savvy but they expect more from their employers and want to be seen as being ‘different from what went before them’. They are very ambitious (maybe due to increased competition in the job market) and active social media usage is ingrained in them.

4 | New Technology – Technology and trends evolve fast – enough said.

These four things combined are forcing the hand of some companies to change their internal culture. Perhaps in the past these organisations got away with being intrinsically tight, and restrictive in their approach to customer services, PR and marketing but today this is simply not effective.

Social Media is Driving New Behaviour

Social media has without doubt driven new behavioural trends. Some might argue it has just created additional headache for businesses. Procter & Gamble were famously caught saying social media simply ‘amplified the volume of moaning’.

Hyper Connectivity

The world is hyper-connected. Customers demand instant gratification and there is an increasing sense of impatience. The era of waiting in queues for call centre operators is coming to an end as more and more people try to queue-jump via social media – we are now demanding real time customer service experiences.

A great example of this was from Virgin Trains – a passenger complained via Twitter about the air con being off. The tweet made it all the way to Virgin Trains head office and sent on to the driver of the train who activated the air con and made an announcement thanking the passenger for making him aware. This is a brilliant example of good and reactive customer services however, the question it raises is: If that is how we start to respond to customer queries, how much more will our customers demand from us and come to expect as standard? “Businesses need to get better at responding to consumers and breaking news in real time rather than in their own institutional time” said Thomas.

You have a 60 minute response time when deciding whether to reply to negative blog comments – 60 minutes seems a lot when you consider you only have 10 minutes to decide what to reply to a negative tweet! With this in mind, it is astonishing that some companies who actively choose to engage in social media can take 10 days to get a tweet approved (yes this is a real life example)!

The Connected Consumer vs. The Disconnected Organisation

There is a new struggle between the highly connected and tech savvy consumers and the organisations whose customer facing departments are disconnected and siloed. There is simply no room for this approach when using social media.

How to Use Social Media Effectively Without Destabilising Your Business

It’s totally understandable that social media is a destabilising entity in some businesses, especially if they haven’t got the company culture that compliments it.  If your business is one of the many who restrict the use of social media, or block its use altogether, you no doubt think there is more to be lost than gained from the use of social. Thomas gave his top 5 tips for how businesses can get the most from social media:

1 | Instil Trust

“Trust is the bedrock of social media change”. CEO’s have to take an approach of presumed competence rather than presumed incompetence. Take the Nordstrom example, Nordstrom have a new employee pack which includes a rule book. In the rule book there is only one rule and it is: ‘Use good judgement at all times”. Thomas also said that being ‘loose’ is not easy. The critical factor is that you spend time and energy on recruiting, training and retaining the right staff . If they are not right for your business do not employ them – and if they are right and you should feel comfortable empowering them to play an active part in your company’s social media profile.

2 | Be Open and Honest

Secrets don’t stay secret for long online. Transparency and honesty are important. Plus we all need thicker skins – we cannot please all of the people all of the time. ASDA is a good example – when people criticised their £2.50 chickens, questioning the quality of life of the birds, ASDA put live webcams up so people could see the conditions for themselves.

Social media will bring critics to your door but this is not altogether negative. Studies show that people who have a mix of both negative and positive reviews on their websites will actually gain more trust (68%) and more sales (70% are more likely to buy from sites with mixed but authentic review profiles). People are suspicious of anything too perfect or anything that looks unnatural or staged.

3 |  Be Agile

Agility is essential. It cannot take you 10 days to sign off a tweet. Those brands leading the way for positive social media usage have command centers that monitor all their comments 24 hours a day. You have to know about it in order to respond! This is particularly important for crisis and reputation management.

4 | Be Informal

One really interesting point Martin makes is that the content you produce no longer has to be perfect either. Particularly in a crisis there is not time to make a corporate video or well-tuned speech. Action is needed immediately. Will Walsh of British Airways took it upon himself to produce a short video responding to the cabin crew strikes. He did it ad hoc and while it was done on the fly, it was more powerful because it was honest, timely and not overly polished.

5 | Collaboration

Today’s world has a self-organising spirit. The riots were an example of this, although not a good one perhaps. Things just happen because there is a sense of community online – and sometimes this is more than there is offline! Communal spirit can be leveraged by organisations in so many positive ways, from creative product development to cutting costs: Someone once said ‘no one wants a relationship with a bag of crisps’ however Walkers might argue differently considering the volume of responses it had to its last flavour campaign! Visit Britain reportedly saved £200k by sourcing photos from Flickr last year.

McKinsey found that 70% of companies said they built value from creating online communities – Thomas gave an excellent example – RS Components who created the DesignSpark community. They managed to build a community of 17,000 design engineers from 139 countries. As a result they had direct access to key influencers and financial analysts actually uprated the parent businesses finance rating! The point…? Things can be better organised without any organisation at all (also consider the very successful community powered business – GiffGaff from O2)! This extends to customer services too – why not let your customers help other customers?

Key Takeaways from the Martin Thomas ‘Loose Theory’

To summarise a few key points from the session:

- It is easier to get customer services staff to engage and learn about social media than it is to get techies to be good at handling customers

- Time spent on social media is what you make of it. When people found out that the CEO of Starbucks spent up to two hours a day on Twitter responding to customer queries – some questioned whether his time could be better spent elsewhere. He however saw it as being at the front line of his business.

- Fully embracing social media will make your company better (and probably improve the way your staff perceive your business too).

- Get the organisational culture right and success in social media should follow.

I tip my hat to Martin Thomas who really inspired me this morning. The greatest part is that all of this activity plays into your SEO strategy – all the content you create, all the mentions you generate and all the noise made online about your brand is playing an increasingly large part in your ranking too! PR, Marketing, SEO and Social are all intrinsically linked – combine the in-house skills you have in this area for best success.

Finn PR will be running another session on 11st September in Leeds – this time Mr LinkedIn: Mark Williams will be speaking about how businesses can leverage LinkedIn better. If you are interested in attending please email us at social@searchlaboratory.com!

About Martin Thomas

Appreciating how it looks from their point of view is important, so here are a few points some SEO professionals could do with remembering next time they try explaining something to a newcomer:

They probably have no idea how Google works:

This might sound stupid, but it’s hard to realise how much really goes on behind the scenes until you’re working with Google in mind all day long. The spiders, the indexing, the ranking; it’s just assumed that the internet magically knows what goes where, until someone explains that actual people and alot of technology are working to keep our searches running smoothly.

SEO lingo makes no sense to anyone outside the industry

Trying to educate oneself about SEO proves very difficult until you have learnt the language – spiders, bots, no follow, rel=alternate – nothing makes any sense, and reading the comments and forums written by SEO experts can get pretty confusing when every other word is one you’ve never heard of before.

Advice is constantly contradicted

“White hat vs. Black hat and then “grey hat”! Imagine coming into that discussion without any experience of SEO, and you’ll understand why it gets confusing for people. Explain the difference between all these hats, and make sure you get across why white hat is the best way to boost rankings so everyone understands what the processes involves.

With all this in mind it was suggested that we could do with a glossary of SEO terms on our website, so I decided to get the ball rolling with a couple of the most confusing names and sayings that are flying around the internet… a number focus on the negative SEO techniques that we don’t condone but as these are hot topics right now thanks to the recent Panda and Penguin updates I thought it worth including them…

Above the fold

The top section of a site page that can be seen without having to scroll down – headlines or valuable content is usually placed here. Recent updates from Google penalised sites that used this valuable real estate for spammy adverts.

Black Hat SEO

SEO techniques and methods that ignore Google’s guidelines and attempt to boost site ranking using spammy tactics like poor quality content and unethical linking strategies.

Breadcrumb Navigation

Links provided near the top of site pages that show the user’s path to their current location, allowing them to navigate the website with ease.

Google Bowling / Negative SEO

Building spammy or bad links to a website with the intention of lowering their rank – or after the recent Google penalties, getting it de-indexed altogether.

Google Bomb

Pranks played by several webmasters at once resulting in significant changes to the Google search results.

Grey Hat

Term used to describe a mix of white and black hat SEO techniques; it is argued by some that all SEO is Grey Hat as trying to artificially manipulate search results is could be considered Black Hat in itself (a controversial topic in the SEO world.

Link Juice

The trust and value passed from an authoritative or highly ranked site through a link to another site; the more link juice gained from highly ranked sites, the higher your site will rank in Google search results.

Link Condom

Preventing link juice (authority) from passing through a link using methods such as nofollow tags.

Link Farming

Sites that ‘farm’ out links to each other in order to gain better pagerank; this is a spammy method of link building which is now penalised heavily by Google.

Splog

A blog filled with spammy content and links, with poor value and black hat techniques.

White Hat

Ethical content rich SEO that puts the customer at the heart of the activity – producing relevant, interesting content and distributing naturally by word of mouth, social media and so on.

What is the weirdest SEO term you have come up against to date? Any you still don’t get the meaning of? All comments welcome!

Google’s latest round of updates has sent a wave of panic through the SEO world. Admittedly every publicised update leads to claims that ‘SEO is dead’, ‘Google has ruined its organic search’ and so on. But this time round we have actually seen some fairly dramatic changes. A number of sites have been hit harder than expected. The subject has been extensively covered on a number of SEO blogs, but as the dust clears we are getting a better idea of the impact and what can be done.

What’s happening?

A brief timeline of events is as follows:

On April 16 a number of websites where caught by a bug which mistook them for parked domains. The most dramatic example was Seer Interactive, a highly respected Search marketing agency which completely vanished from the organic results for a day. Then on April 19 Panda 3.5 was rolled out. The dreaded Penguin officially came out to play on April 24. Then on April 27 Panda 3.6 went out, but by this was a fairly minor run.

The bug was fixed within a day, and isn’t really worth worrying about. The key issue is that they can and do happen. When they do there isn’t much you can do about it beyond waiting for it to be fixed but on the bright side they are usually fixed fairly quickly.

Pandas 3.5 and 3.6 are updates to Google’s algorithms that target duplicate and thin content. SEOmoz has a great post covering the basics of Panda updates and what can be done, and of course, we have our own take on Panda.

What was genuinely new was the Penguin update which is targeting ‘over optimised’ webpages. We don’t know everything that it is looking at (read this useful post from Search Engine Roundtable), but one of the clearest targets was link spam. By link spam I mean unnatural links. For example paid links such as ‘made for SEO’ directories, blog networks like ‘Build My Rank’ as well as exchanging links with unrelated sites all count as link spam.

Will it affect my rankings?

Well if it hasn’t affected your rankings yet, then you probably won’t be hit this time. However there is quite a lot of evidence that sites that shouldn’t have been hit have been. The most egregious example was Viagra, where the official site disappeared from the search results. For a critical overview of Penguin’s effect on the rankings Search Engine Land has a great article.  Aside from a number of people complaining about their rankings being affected Google has put out a form for webmasters who think that their site was hit unfairly, which suggests that it might have had a broader impact than expected.

My site got hit, what can I do about it?

The main issue at hand is of course what to do if your site has been targeted. The first thing is to look for the most likely cause. Just because you rankings have fallen since April 24 doesn’t mean that that it was Penguin which knocked your site down. The Panda updates are also likely culprits. However there are some key clues we can use to find out if it was a Panda or a Penguin which hit you.

Penguin victims will probably, but not necessarily, have received an unnatural links warning notice a couple of weeks before their site got hit (this would have appeared in Webmaster Tools). Even if you haven’t it is worth checking your backlink profile to look for two things. The first is for paid links. Examples of these are low quality directories, blog networks or footer links. Alongside paid links it’s worth adding that if you have a link exchange page, then you really need to take it down.

The second is to look for an unnatural anchor text distribution, for example if the site “delicoussweets.com” has lots of backlinks with anchor text “chocolate fudge” but not many with different anchor text then this is prime spam signal. Basically if your site has a lot of keyword rich anchor text, then it’s going to look very suspicious to any passing Penguins.

If you have either of these signals, (and if you have one you’ll probably have the other) then you have some work to do. In ways this means going to back to basics. For spam links you need to try to get them taken down. This is a fairly simple, but time consuming process. Once you have a list of your backlinks then it’s a matter of going through them and contacting the webmasters of sites which host bad links to yours. Once you have got rid of as many as possible then you can issue a reconsideration request to Google detailing what you have done to make your link profile as natural as normal.

You will then need to get back to link building, which I’ll talk about a bit later.

I’ve been hearing a lot about Negative SEO, is this related?

The obvious worry that comes from the penalties that Google is attaching to unnatural links is that it is very easy to buy a load of keyword rich anchor text links and point them at someone else’s site in the hope of giving them a penalty. This is also known as negative SEO or Link Bombing. There is some evidence that this can work, but it is far from clear. The biggest case so far was experiment targeting Dan Thies’ site (SEO Fast Start) with exact match keywords for four phrases. On the 22 March 2012 SEO Fast Start ranked as following for keywords below.

1. Dan Thies: # 1
2. SEO: # 11
3. SEO Services: # 34
4. SEO book: # 3

On the 18 April they looked like this:

1. Dan Thies – # 1 (still)
2. SEO – not in top 1000 (down from # 11)
3. SEO service – not in top 1000 (down from # 34)
4. SEO book – number 34 (down from # 3)

At first glance the results appear pretty conclusive with SEO Fast Start falling several places for the last of the keywords that they targeted. The problem is that at the same time Thies made some changes to his site that may have also had an effect on one of the rankings (SEO Book). For the other two rankings they had shot up to their locations after someone else had built 5000 guest post links to his site starting on the 18 March. According to Thies this had pushed up his rankings for SEO and SEO services for a while before they returned to normal. There have been a couple of other cases such as an attack on a site called www.justgoodcars.com, but again this example is problematic. In this case because justgoodcars already had some poor quality links and thin content the penalty might well have been applied for different reasons.

If negative SEO does work, and I’m not convinced it does – how do you defend against it? Well you can’t stop someone trying to attack you but buy building a good website with a great link profile you can make it much less likely to be effective.

Websites such as https://ahrefs.com/ can give you a link graph showing the number of links over time for a website. If you suddenly gain a load of links for no reason then it’s likely that someone is targeting your website. You can then send Google a pre-emptive reconsideration request to prove that it’s not you doing it, but a good site will probably be a better defence. Rand Fishkin has done a great video on negative SEO which is worth watching if you’re worried.

Has this changed SEO?

The most obvious change is that link building tactics such as paying for links and directories, as well as article submissions, have become a lot more risky. I won’t say that they don’t work at all if that is the way you wish to go, but the risk is far higher than it used to be. Instead, a focus on gaining high quality, relevant links is essential in our opinion. Gaining these links is hard work, but that is why they carry far less risk and more long term reward.

The key is producing high quality content, whether that is articles, videos, illustrations or whatever else you can produce. This content is both for your own site to establish yourself as an authority and for other sites to spread the word. Good quality content will also make it far easier for you to interact with the public over social media and diversify your sources of traffic. White-hat SEO after Penguin is the same just even more important. Black-hats may well need to have a bit of rethink.

Tell us your view on the latest Panda and Penguin updates. Has your site been hit and if so why do you think it has and when did you notice the fluctuation? All comments welcomed.

SEO writing can be said to be somewhat compromised by the limitations of keywords and the businesses our clients are involved in. This presents a challenge; creating interesting, informative and entertaining content that is still relevant to the keywords we need to build links around.

Relevancy

Relevancy is important for a few reasons:

1 | High quality blogs are unlikely to accept guest posts that reek of SEO.  Content, however well written, with an irrelevant anchor text link might as well be spam. It is ugly and reflects badly on the posts intentions regardless of the posts quality. To use a strained analogy; put your bin in the middle of your garden and nobody will care about the quality of your flower arranging, they’ll just want to know what possessed you to put your bin there.

2 | It may be the case that you aren’t that concerned about the guest posts quality so long as you get your link (this does not apply to anyone at Search Laboratory obviously – we don’t work this way for good reason). This is not effective really as Google is getting much better at finding this type of writing and devaluing it. By writing relevant content you are not only making it better to read in the present but safeguarding it for the future. In six months, as algorithms get more sophisticated, you don’t want to be contacting a webmaster asking them to take down a post you wrote about holidays in the Maldives because it contained a spammy, irrelevant link to a mechanics firm in Huddersfield!

3 | Writing relevant content makes you feel better. SEO’s will know when they have sent something off to a blog that is a bit incongruous, it probably isn’t a nice feeling; certainly not as nice as sending a high quality piece you are actually proud of anyway. Put it this way, if someone not involved in SEO asks about your writing – what would you prefer to show them? The good relevant stuff, right?

Creativity

Now, while we have established that guest posts have to be relevant, this does not mean they have to lack variety. I’m going to use a post I recently wrote as an example. While brainstorming the topic of video conferencing I remembered the sheer amount of films I had seen where people in the future were communicating through video-screens. This led me to write a guest post about video conferencing in science fiction films and how accurate the predictions of these films had been. This opened up a whole world of possibilities when it came to approaching bloggers. This guest post could appeal to film blogs, sci-fi blogs, geek culture blogs and so on. The article was still relevant because, despite being about films, (and I won’t lie I enjoyed writing it because it was about films) it was also undeniably about video conferencing so the link did not look out of place.

I believe that as long as the internet has words in it then writing will be part of SEO. There is a concern in the industry that SEO guest posts are becoming increasingly unpopular with bloggers and Google; convincing many that guest posting should have less prominence in link building. I disagree with this assertion. The reason bloggers are becoming cynical towards SEO is the fault of poor SEO in the past, not Google or anyone else. If we all strive to strike the balance between creativity, relevance and quality we will ensure that the SEO industry’s reputation when it comes to delivering quality written work is restored throughout the blogosphere.

Any comments or questions are welcome. If you want to ask anything directly I can be contacted on twitter @KevinBall1982 or follow @searchlabs for regular search marketing news and updates.

As we all know by now, Google seeks to reward high quality, unique content and has been doing so for some time. This has placed more emphasis on quality guest blogging as opposed to building up a backlink profile full of directory links and article submissions.

Been There, Done That

Whilst there is no question that writing quality content is a good move, it can cause problems for companies with limited creative resources. It is particularly problematic for those people operating in a very niche market. Take for example, a business that specialises in desk calendars. There are only so many articles you can write about the actual product itself, and perhaps more importantly, only so many blogs that you can target for that all important link.

So after months of writing about different design options for desk calendars, you may think you’re totally out of material, right? Wrong.

A Fresh Start

There are a number of ways you can come up with new ideas and new angles which open a number of doors for you in terms of link building. This way, you prevent yourself from getting stuck in a rut when it comes to creating content, and more importantly, prevent yourself from constantly finding the same blogs when looking to place guest posts.

For a small business owner who doesn’t have any in-house staff, websites such as this link bait generator might come in handy. Simply enter your keyword, and the website will do the rest of the work for you by generating a (pretty generic) title that can be used for a piece of link bait or a blog post. As you may expect however, the titles can range from dull as dishwater, to downright outrageous, and always seem to involve a number.

The use of numbers in the headlines is an interesting point. There is a common understanding that numbers in headlines are particularly effective. This article from Content Marketing Institute states that posts that are in the form of a list tend to generate more traffic and click-throughs, and that lists with an odd number of points generated a further 20% of click-throughs.

I came up with a few random keywords inspired by the everyday objects that I can see in front of me and put them into the link bait generator; here are a few of the results I got back:

“8 Things You Think You Know About Desk Calendars But You Really Don’t”

“7 Health Problems Associated With Clocks”

“8 Outrageous Frauds Involving Ball Point Pens”

“6 Shockingly Evil Things About Post-It Notes”

Getting a 500 word piece out of those titles would be a tough ask for the most talented (or obscure, depending on how you look at it) writer, however the more obscure pieces of content also tend to be the ones that garner the most attention and generate the most traffic. As a result, these posts are the ones most likely to be linked to.

Brainstorming

On a more serious note, there are a few ways that you can come up with different ideas for content without letting a randomly generated website do all the work for you. When it comes to brainstorming, it’s wise not to rule any idea out as too tenuous.

In-house SEO’s from larger companies could do a lot worse than to sit down with other members of staff from their PR and marketing departments to throw a few ideas around. Firstly, ensure they are educated on and embrace SEO. This way, they will know what will be of use to you. Any sort of press releases, charity links or awards are a good starting point for link generation. Also, brainstorming with people from different areas of expertise  is a great way to discover new angles as they have experience of writing on different topics for different purposes.

Take A Look Around

Using everyday items as an example again, think about where you may stereotypically see stationery. A few quick ideas could include business branded pens, school stationery and everyday office supplies. That’s just a few suggestions and from those you could target business, workplace and educational blogs as a starting point.

With regards to content for these sites, it’s probably best that you don’t focus specifically on the product and maybe just give it a passing mention. For example, an idea would be to target business blogs with a post titled “Top Ten Tips To Stand Out At Trade Shows” and give a mention to branded pens somewhere in there, like:

“Free gifts are always a good way to win over punters at trade shows is to give them a token free gift. Goodie bags that include small items such as sweets, badges and branded pens will ensure that your presence at the show lasts in the memory of attendees.”

This way, the post isn’t commercial and plugging a product or service, and is reaching out and opening doors to blogs you wouldn’t have had a reason to contact otherwise.

Similarly, it’s also beneficial to take advantage of things happening at the time. Keeping up with current affairs is extremely important in most businesses and SEO is no different. There are a number of major sporting events coming up in 2012, and many SEO’s will be racking their brains for ideas to tie these into content that they can use. In-house SEO’s could do worse than to keep up to date with their marketing and PR teams to see if they are doing anything for the occasions.

It’s inevitable that occasionally, as an in-house SEO or small business owner, you may find yourself short of inspiration for new content. It’s important to link build with an open mind and not be too dismissive of ideas. A lot of the time, it’s a case of trial and error and there’s no guaranteed quick fix, but you never know if something’s going to work unless you try it! If you have a spare few minutes, then check out this “Whiteboard Friday” video from Rand Fishkin on SEOmoz, as he gives a few more tips to overcoming your winter of dis-content (his pun, not mine…unfortunately!)

How do you come up with creative ideas? All comments welcome… you no doubt have devised your own approach to creative brainstorming and we would love to hear it!

I have decided to divide this blog post into two parts in order for you to get a bigger picture on how social media affects SEO.  All comments are welcome as we all want to learn from different views and experiences.

The relationship between Social Media and SEO

Social media and SEO are linked. They both affect each other which is why you need to do customer centred keyword research, create consumer centric content and then make people around the globe aware of yourcontent through social media.

When writing social media content, for example a blog, it is important to follow some simple rules which also apply to websites in terms of SEO:

-          In order to increase relevance to specific keywords you need to regularly edit your content.

-          Remember to optimise your media content; inc. images, videos etc.

-          Remove probable barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

-          When mentioned in social media make sure you obtain back links and inbound links to your website.

-          Link back to your website when you are talking about relevant content on other sites.

-          Use rich and varied anchor text (your keywords).

-          Use social bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon and Digg to create influential and natural inbound links.

-          Create social media assets (Facebook, Twitter, blog, YouTube) along with your website to ensure that these sites are taking up space on the first page when people are searching for your company’s keywords.

-          Make sure people can “tweet”, “retweet”, “Like”, “+1” etc. content on your website.

-          Create mutual engagement by following others on Twitter, retweeting and @ replying them.

How social media affects content relevance in search

Personalised results are now given much greater emphasis on Google and other search engines than before. Social content such as blog posts and Google+ postings are much more prominent on Google SERPs.

This example shows how traditional search results are being deemphasised in Google’s SERPs complexity:

What affects search results in Google’s ranking are social shares like Google +1’s, Tweets, Likes etc., whereas the display visibility is impacted by social media content AND shares (as you can see above, the Google+ account appears on the right side and affects your search results). Therefore, user behaviour and preferences are critical when you chose your SEO strategy. This is because the display strategy depends on if the user has a Google account (and is logged in) and whether they are active in social media networks. If your target market is not actively using social media and does not have a Google account, traditional search results would be the most important form of result for your target market.

One of my favourite social media tools is called Twitterfall – it is a pretty good tool to help you search Twitter in real time. A great feature is that you can use it in different languages which is pretty handy if you are working with multilingual SEO.

Here you can search for a specific keyword and after a few seconds a list of people tweeting about your keyword will appear. This is worth doing if you want to find influencers and also want to know what people are saying about the specific topic you are interested in.

Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land explained SEO in social media like this:

“The links you build through social media, the references, the authority – all can have an impact in various ways on how you are ranked and listed to even in ‘regular’ search results. Social media allows for people to provide more trusted signals”.

This is also the case with Bing’s search engine. A Microsoft spokesperson for Bing sai:

“As ideas, thought, questions and answers are shared more freely and easily than ever, the increased amount of information from social sources provides great benefits to users.”

As explained, popular content shared amongst your friends on Facebook, as well as popular topics on Facebook in general are more likely to appear in Bing’s search results.

Google introduced the +1 button as an answer to the Bing-Facebook deal so it now seems to be a social fight between the rivals. But will these search results actually benefit us consumers? Will we end up with the best search results if the search engines constantly keep in mind our social behaviour? I guess it is beneficial in some ways as they are aware of our interests. Personally I think it would also in some cases be nice to get a feel of “anonymity” where the search engines don’t know everything about you, which I think most people would agree upon. However, it is said that in the future  Google will most likely start giving equal weight to both ranking and display optimisation where the SERPs will end up being subjective (content which is favoured by people in your social networks) and objective (content that is ranked according to Google’s traditional algorithm) to your search results.

It is crucial to human success that industries know what we like – which is what the search engines have taken to heart. If people share your content, other readers are more likely to listen to you and view your content too – this is because they trust that the recommendations it has received implies it is good quality, reader friendly and interesting content!

What Are Copyright Free Images?

A surprising amount of people simply use Google images to find a picture they like and use it on a blog post as their own. In reality the only way you can actually use an image without the fear of punishment is if you made or took the picture yourself.

The only pictures that are actually copyright free are those which are classed as public domain and have no copy attached. Even if you decide to use a public domain image, it does not then become owned by you, this is because the image copyright cannot be restored.

Is there anywhere on the web I can find quality images?

There are actually more picture libraries than you might first assume. Most of these give anyone access to a vast, ever-growing range of images. Some of these sites can be quite expensive, but there is a choice of great, easy to use picture libraries which are very reasonably priced, if not free. A number of the sites provide images where the author/owner of the image has given permission for others to use their work as long as it meets specific criteria. This is known as Creative Commons. The most open of these licences is the ‘attribution’ licence; this is where the only thing you have to do to use the image is to credit its owner.

Here is a list of some good Creative Commons sites:

• Flickr
• Compfight.com
• FreeFoto.com
• FreeImages.co.uk
• OpenPhoto
• PicFindr – This site is particularly helpful as it searches across a number of free to use image sites at the same time.

Optimising Images

A lot of people don’t even think about optimising their images. A great start is to use the ALT text in your web site HTML to include your keyword(s) and the name of the image. The ALT text describes the image to the search engines and is crucial in creating a match when people search. The TITLE tag will appear when the user hovers over the image.

Including text with related keywords around the image itself will also help for Search Engine Optimisation purposes, as will using .jpg format wherever possible.

The images you choose should no longer just be about the aesthetics. Images can help your pages rank higher when they are optimised properly. Ensure to not only change the file name and write a suitable ALT tag, it’s also advisable to link the image to a post on your site which the reader may also find useful. This in turn gives more traffic to the site in question.

If you are using WordPress, remember to use the SEO Friendly Images plug-in, which does all the hard work for you by updating your images automatically with the correct ALT and TITLE attributes.

What Can Happen if You Violate Copyrights

Copyright infringement can be very serious. If you are caught, you will at the very least be made to remove the infringing image(s) from publication.

If someone decides to take legal action, you could be subject to a civil lawsuit that could be financially devastating.

If it is classed as a deliberate violation, you could be faced with criminal penalties, which could lead to a hefty fine and in some cases long prison sentences. My advice is don’t risk it!

If you have any advice, suggestions for good free stock imagery sites or any real life experiences of trying to use and optimising stock images online we would love to hear from you. All comments welcomed.

So… Matt talks about the 3 things you need to do well in order to be the world’s best search engine:

1. Crawl the web comprehensively and deeply
2. Index pages (‘documents’ as he commonly refers to them) and…
3. Rank/serve and return the most relevant pages first

‘Crawling the Web’

Crawling is more difficult than we think – understandable given the volume of content online nowadays, but essentially Page Rank (PR) is the primary determinant – this is the rank given to your website that is based upon:

1. The number of people linking to your site (backlinks)
2. The reputation of those people who link to your website (their PR and authority)

Put simply, a good PR basically helps Google find your website quicker and easier. This is common sense – the more links pointing to your site (and the more links you have from very high authority sites like news sites; the CNN and New York Times of this world) the more likely and faster the Googlebot will crawl your site. It basically spends its time crawling around the web starting with the most authoritative sites and follows links as it comes across them. Hence if you have a long standing website the Googlebot will usually come from a.n.other site to yours to rank it – the more it is encouraged to come the more you are likely to benefit.

A bit of history

Historically Google crawled the web for several weeks at a time, indexed it for a week and then pushed out the ranked pages it found over another week period. This was called the ‘Google Dance’.

However this long winded ‘Google Dance’ meant Google was forever out of date with what was actually happening online. News sites particularly, as we all know, change on an hourly basis. This world!

Back in 2003, as part of Update Fritz, Google started to crawl a significant amount of the web every day. By breaking up the web into segments (determined by Page Rank) Google crawled each segment more frequently and ensured that (at the very least) the most commonly updated websites rankings were refreshed daily. Google also had a ‘supplemental’ index or ‘supplemental results’ which were not crawled and refreshed quite as often. This index included more websites by number and was where most small, less well known websites sat in the indexing process.

Incremental indexing however has improved over time and today Google can see updates made to sites very quickly and easily. The process gets ever quicker and more efficient. These are the basic principles of ‘comprehensive crawling’ of the Internet. Next Google has to index the web…

‘Indexing’ and ‘Document Selection’

Rather than looking for search terms in word order in amongst the millions of online documents and webpages, Google breaks down search terms into individual words and checks which online pages they appear in – this is the ‘index’.

To give Cutts’ example – if searching for ‘Katy Perry’ Google looks for all the documents with the word ‘Katy’ in and all the documents with ‘Perry’ in. It searches the web separately for both words and then cross references the list of documents where they appear separately to then see if they appear in both. Only if the keywords searched appear in both documents does Google consider including this page in its search results. Google looks at both on-page content AND off-page anchor text to see if those keywords appear. This is the process of ‘Document Selection’. The indexing process is the reverse of what one might expect. Rather than having documents with the search term in word order as was typed – Google lists the places the word appears in document order.

‘Ranking’

Now, unsurprisingly this is where Google becomes more muted – Google uses PR and over 200 other factors to help determine the authority of the document. Matt openly admits that even the most authoritative page with a high PR, might not have many mentions of the keyword searched. Common sense says this page cannot be as relevant despite its authority, so Google looks at links pointing to the page, the proximity of the keywords to each other within the content and the repetition of those searched terms. It balances the reputation of the document with relevance to the searched term and presents results according to its latest indexed data.

So what actually happens when someone presses the ‘Google Search’ button?

So let’s say a searcher comes to Google and types their query. Google has to send that search query to the closest data centre to the searcher and from here it is sent out to hundreds of different machines around the world all at the same time. Those machines look through the fraction of data they hold from their latest index from Google and return the pages they think are the most relevant matches for the search query.

Google looks at these returned results and tries to determine what Cutts describes as “the crème de la crème” of pages. Once it has decided which pages are the very best in terms of relevance and authority, Google displays those pages to the searcher on the SERP. Pages are passed back including a snippet that shows the keyword in its context on the page, and the search is completed. This all takes place in under half a second which frankly is incredible!

Job done!

So what can Marketers takeaway from Matt’s video?

While this might not be ground breaking news to some tech geeks, this eloquent explanation of Google’s indexing and ranking process is very interesting and provides a great basis for understanding when it comes to SEO.

I believe many people simply didn’t understand this process, and the video bridges some gaps and helps educate people about the reasons why black hat SEO techniques do not work. Many felt Google were purposely evasive about how they choose what results to display, but this video could be the start of a more transparent ranking process – or so one might hope?

What Matt doesn’t discuss is how Google over the years has come to understand, seek out and penalise websites who try to trick Google’s very important Googlebots. It’s quite plain that the ranking algorithm looks at page rank, backlinks and content, and these things cannot be faked (well if they are they are just as quickly caught and penalised).

The fact is that page rank is determined by authority which flows down from the pages who link to you. It’s very hard to get a link from the BBC or CNN for example without having relevant and newsworthy content as I am sure you may have already found. The best sites who can benefit your SEO most do not give away links lightly. They are the Holy Grail for SEO’s. Fundamentally however, everything comes back to the need for genuinely good content. You can obtain links from these sites but only if you have highly creative, newsworthy stories and content to share. Sadly this is not something you can cheat at. One link from a news site like the BBC is worth far more to your SEO and your websites profitability than hundreds and hundreds of spammy, low-quality links that you can buy quickly and easily. It’s a fact I am afraid.

Page rank flows down the chain from high authority website page and through the links in that page out into other third party websites (we call it ‘link juice’). (Imagine a champagne tower if you are struggling with this concept)! This flow is what helps determine your page rank and helps you be noticed by Google in the first instance.

Good quality, consumer-centric content (and lots of it) is crucial. The more ‘documents’ or web pages that talk in a user friendly way about what you do, offer or sell – the more chance you have of Google ranking your page in its crème de la crème results. Simple.

Gone are the days of tricking Google – it’s just not worth the time or money. So my takeaway is: Do it once, do it properly and you will see the long term benefits.

Watch Matt’s video for yourself:

I’d love to hear your thoughts about Matt’s video – what did you learn from it, did you like it and what if anything would you ask Google?