How Important Is Content Creation?
Without content no website can succeed. It’s like a car without an engine. It just won’t go. So you can bet it’s the most important part of your website development. But should you outsource it or hire an in-house writing team?
There are pros and cons to both. An in-house writing team will be easier and more convenient to communicate with and train. However, it could also be more expensive.
With outsourcing, it’s easier to let someone go if they aren’t producing the quality that you expect. It’s also a good way to test writers that you may be considering for an in-house team. Many times you can get very good quality writers at just a fraction of the cost of hiring someone to work inside your company.
So where do you find writers to produce your content? Here are a few resources you might consider:
- Craigslist
- Freelance websites like Guru and Elance
- Reading blogs within your niche or industry
- Job boards
- Local colleges and universities
- Professional writing associations
It’s important that any writer you hire, whether they be an in-house writer or a freelance writer, have some necessary knowledge. At a minimum they should:
- Be familiar with search engine optimization strategies
- Understand social media marketing
- Know your goals and objectives
- Be familiar with your company style and voice
On that last point, it’s not just important to know your style and voice. A good writer must be able to imitate it. After all, they are producing content for your website and your readers will know if they get it wrong.
Whether you hire an in-house writing team or a group of freelancers, keep in mind that your content is your business. Don’t let them compromise it.
What Is The Value Of A Link?
Infographics can be helpful or just a sad attempt at link bait. But one thing is for sure, if they are helpful to others then they can helpful to you. This infographic by Vertical Measures illustrates that very well.
What makes this infographic so useful is it’s awesome simplicity. Right away you’ll notice that there are two categories of links based on this graphic. There are PR values and there are link types. The graphic breaks link types down into these categories:
- Content
- Blog/Forum comments
- Purchased
- Reciprocal
- Embedded
- Reclaimed
- Natural
- Requested
But which ones are the most important, or most valued?
This is really subjective, but Vertical Measures ranks them according to two metrics – difficulty and quality. In general, the more difficult it is to obtain a link of a particular type then the higher quality that link will be, which translates into more value for the link builder.
From easiest to most difficult, VM ranks them this way: Content Distribution, Blog and Forum Comments and Purchased Links are easiest to obtain. Next are reciprocal links. The third level of difficulty is populated by social media links, embedded content and reclaimed links. Natural links are the next most difficult to obtain and the most difficult links of all are link requests. This is almost a no-brainer.
From lowest to highest again, quality scores are broken down this way:
- Reciprocal links are in the lowest position (note that they are second level in order of most difficult or easiest to obtain)
- Purchased links and comments are slightly higher quality than reciprocal links
- Distributed content and social media links are next on the quality scale
- Embedded content is a bit higher quality than social media and content distribution links
- Finally, the highest quality links are reclaimed, natural and requested
Notice some slight jumbling in the order but generally following the same parallel between quality and ease of obtaining?
The most interesting part of the value score that I find, however, is the break down of PR values. A PR1 link, for instance, is the equivalent of 11 average links, according to the infographic. That begs the assumption that the PR1 link you get is above average. The question is, What’s average? Would that be a 3 on the quality scale? If so then that would include social media and distributed content links. But some of those types of links can themselves be extraordinary, can’t they?
Vertical Measures places a PR10 link to have the equivalent value of 28,080,881 average links. In other words, get one PR10 link and that could be enough to push you up to a respectable search engine ranking.
Getting the picture yet?
I think the point is to get you thinking about what types of links you should be going after. Personally, I think you should pursue any links you can get. Many Internet marketers in recent years have tried discouraging their clients from chasing reciprocal links because they aren’t valued as highly as one-way links. But the fact is they do carry value. Get a reciprocal link from a PR7 site when your site is a lowly PR4 then that will be a valuable link.
I think you can over think the question. To build a solid link portfolio you need to build diversity into it. That means not focusing on any one particular type of link or link from sites with a high PR. After all, PR1 links carry value too. And some day that PR1 site might become a PR8 site. Your link will still be there.
When it comes to link building, just do it. Do it smartly, but don’t over think it.
How Twitter Can Be Good SEO
Have you seen one of your tweets hit page 1 for a key search term? If so then you understand how it can be good SEO. If not then pay attention because this isn’t rocket science.
Of course, not everyone is doing it either.
Twitter results are now a part of all the major search engine results in real time. But even outside of real time you can rank for keywords on Twitter as well as on secondary social networks.
A secondary social network is a social media site you are a member of that automatically updates any time you update your Twitter feed. Many social media sites allow you to sync your profile with your Twitter feed so that your tweets automatically appear on those sites. Every tweet that is fed to a secondary social network has the potential to rank in the search engines.
When you write your tweets, keep your keywords in mind. Target them just as you would in a blog post or any other online content. You might just find your tweets appearing on the first page of search results at all of the search engines.
Why URL Shorteners Are Bad For SEO
It seems that Twitter has made URL shorteners popular again. But are they good?
Naturally, many URL shortening services do offer value-added benefits that you won’t get with your traditional long URLs. The primary benefit to any URL shortening service, of course, is that you don’t have to pass along those godawful long URLs that could take up three lines or more in print. And if that’s the reason you are using the service then more power to you. It’s a useful benefit.
But what you should know about URL shorteners is that they are not good for SEO. Use them sparingly.
Think about this. When a visitor to your website clicks a link you created with an URL shortening service, they are being redirected to the URL shortening service’s website then on to the end page where you want them to land. The visitor actually leaves your website (or the website of origin) for a few seconds while the URL shortening service redirects them to the destination page. Because of this redirect, the link juice that flows from the web page of origin flows to the URL shortening service’s website, not to yours.
You know that some of the important and necessary SEO elements are inbound links with relevant anchor text. You won’t get those benefits with URL shortening so you should weigh the importance of the service against any search engine optimization benefits you desire before committing to URL shortening.
Google Places Optimization
A few weeks ago Google rolled out a new beta within its Local Business product, which it changed to the name of Google Places. They began allowing select cities to offer Tags on their Google Places listing. Now, Tags has been rolled out to all 50 U.S. states.
Tags can be used when your local business has a video, offers coupons, wants to showcase a restaurant menu, feature photos, or just highlight its website. In essence, it’s another way to remain competitive. There’s just one catch.
These Tags aren’t being used to affect search engine rankings.
So why do them then? Well, you should use Tags on your Google Places listings to make them stand out more. Your Tags will allow you to present your Google Places listing in a unique way and showcase features of your business website or online presence that will make your business stand out from the competition. There’s really no better optimization than that.
Is Your SEO A ‘Hail Mary’?
Do you approach SEO like a Hail Mary, just toss it into the air and see where it lands? If that is your style of SEO you could be killing yourself long before you’ve had a chance to succeed. You should never approach SEO, or any type of marketing, blindly or haphazardly.
Good SEO is a strategy. It involves research, strategic planning, phased-in implementation, constant re-thinking and re-organizing and a team play mindset. There are no superstars in corporate SEO strategy. If you have any superstars, or wannabe superstars, replace them and get to work building a solid team with experience and background.
A hail mary pass is a slang term for a football play where the quarterback throws the ball long and high and hopes that a receiver is downfield to catch it. In reality, the odds against the pass being successful are quite low. Most of the time, successful passes are successful because of luck more than anything else. You certainly don’t want your SEO strategy to rely on luck for success. You want that to be planned.
If you are not sure how to plan and implement a successful SEO strategy then contact someone who does. Seek a consultant who understands how to take a company website and turn it into an SEO goldmine. Quit relying on hail marys.
Google Caffeine Hits The Supermarket Line
Finally, Google has announced the complete rollout of Caffeine, its next generation of search. If you’ll remember, Google announced the beta version of Caffeine last year.
So what does this mean, really?
The most significant thing, in my opinion, is that it means a faster Web. It also means that more of the Web is getting indexed. Those two things are pretty significant.
You can also say that Google is able to catch the spam more quickly. But in terms of what it means to you, the individual webmaster, what does it mean?
Here’s what it means in a nutshell:
- You need to focus on real time information (don’t remain static)
- Make sure you don’t look like an idiot because if you do then it will show as soon as you publish – there’s no taking it back
- Try to make your content relevant in as multidimensional a way as possible without watering it down
- Go vertical – news, video, images – any way you can
Just because Google has given us Caffeine doesn’t mean it has given up on universal search and personalized search. They’re incorporated. In fact, every major algorithmic, ranking and indexing change Google has incorporated in the last few years has been rolled into Google Caffeine. That makes Caffeine a pretty special product. But search engine optimization hasn’t really changed at the core. You just have to be smarter about it.
Why Search Engine Optimization Is Still Necessary
Social media may be the big craze, but search engine optimization is still just as necessary today as it ever was. It may be true that the search engines are not as adept at filtering out spam and choosing the best sites for every search query as they used to be. But there are a lot more sites to index and rank today and a lot more spam. It’s a huge undertaking for the search engines to be able to do what they do.
But the lion’s share of web traffic still comes from the search engines. For most websites, the percentage is 70% or more of all web traffic comes from search engine queries. That alone should tell you that search engine optimization is important.
It is no longer a smart idea to rely on just one method of Internet marketing. The wise marketer uses multiple avenues of approach to reach his target market. That means combining search engine optimization with social media marketing, pay per click advertising, link building and even review sites. You have to be ready to close on any traffic from any source at any time.
Most importantly, don’t give up on search engine optimization just because a few other methods of marketing are starting to take on more popularity.
How’s Your Long Tail Hanging?
Google has confirmed rumors that a recent algorithm change has taken place, and that’s a rare event. Not the algorithm change; that happens all the time. But Google confirming reports of an algorithm change rarely happens. Nevertheless, Google is pretty specific about who is affected by this change.
Here’s what I find interesting about the news:
Based on Matt’s comment, this change impacts “long tail” traffic, which generally is from longer queries that few people search for individually, but in aggregate can provide a large percentage of traffic.
In other words, there are some sites out there that are going to do better with their long tail keywords and other sites that won’t do as well. So here’s the question: Which are you?
You should know by now if you’ve seen a rise or a drop in your long tail search rankings. If you see no effect then your site probably hasn’t been affected at all. But if you’ve seen a rise in long tail keyword rankings then Google has helped you; if you’ve seen a fall in similar long tail keyword rankings then Google socked it to you. But don’t take it personally.
These types of algorithm changes are about one thing: Providing searchers with the best web pages for their search queries. If Google made this change then it’s because they believed that the search results were dominated by a certain class of webmaster to the detriment of others. I think this change means that top-notch SEO is not always necessary, but knowing how to do it will improve your changes at getting good rankings.
Would You Buy SEO Services From Your Local Newspaper?
Ever since Google started selling convincing AdWords campaigns to small business owners, newspapers have been in decline. Their advertising customers have been giving up the newspaper ads and doing PPC instead. The revenues have been falling.
I guess they’ve tired of that so now newspapers are selling SEO services. Is that a good thing?
I suppose for the newspaper, it is. But what about the customer?
There is one edge that newspapers have over professional SEO firms. They know their customers. And they can offer personalized local optimization services based on the needs of their customers. So I guess that’s two edges. But can newspapers perform SEO?
I think the only way that will work is if the newspapers employ SEO professionals on staff, or outsource the SEO work. Reporters are not SEO professionals. Advertising representatives are not SEOs either. So it seems to me that if newspapers are going to survive as SEO companies then they need to hire SEO experts. What do you think?
Why Reciprocal Links Are Not Evil
Back in the old days of link building, two sites would get together and agree to link to each other using their most desirable anchor text and promising to link from the page with the highest PageRank. Often, those sites wouldn’t even be related in content. The practice worked – for awhile.
Today, that practice will get you penalized. As a result, there are thousands of SEOs running around telling people not to accept reciprocal links because they are “black hat”, “evil”, “not good”, “bad practice”, etc.
But, they’re not.
Reciprocal links are still valid if they are natural links. That means, if you would link to each other anyway because it’s good for your customers then it’s a good link, reciprocal or not.
Problems with reciprocal linking come in when site owners try to game the PageRank and search engine ranking system by trading non-relevant high-PR links. These links rarely do what they’re supposed to do if you approach the topic with some level of common sense and go about it naturally.
Ask yourself this question, “If I link to this website will it benefit my visitors?” If not then don’t do it, even if the other website owner promises you a high value link. If you can answer the question in the affirmative then go ahead; even a reciprocal link will be better than no link.
Are Rich Snippets Worth The Effort?
Rich snippets – the idea sounds great in principle. Enter data using a special code that the search engines recognize and have that data added to your pages listing in the search results. Ratings, prices, telephone numbers, opening hours; it all sounds great – in principle.
Judging from many of the responses on Google’s Knol page on the subject (unanswered questions at that), you would have to wonder if they were worth the effort. I think it is for a number of reasons, namely:
- It’s the way of the future. While Google isn’t using them extensively as yet, the time will come when this data is used across the board. Including them now means your pages are prepared and you wont have to go back through your pages to update them later.
- They are being used now. While there is no guarantee that your rich snippet will appear your search results, many are. The only saying “you have to be in it to win it” comes to mind. If you don’t include rich snippets, you wont see them in your search listings.
When it comes to winning a click from a user, the more relevant information you can have displayed in the search results the better. If your competitors are showing rich snippet information and you are not, there is a good chance they will win the clicks – that’s not good for your business.
Why Keyword Density Is Not Important
Veteran SEO Stephan Spencer wrote a blog post for Search Engine Land that has sparked a bit of controversy. In this blog post he wrote:
Ok, no one says “da bomb” anymore, but you get the drift. Monitoring keyword density values is pure folly.
A commenter took issue and wrote:
Folly? Hardly. If you’re trying to rank for a keyword, you want to make sure you use it a few times on a page. That’s just common sense. Of course, you don’t want to overuse a keyword, or it might come across as spammy. Any smart SEO pays attention to KW density.
The logic here is a bit spurious. There are two true statements followed by a non-sequitur. Yes, you must use your keyword enough times on a web page for it to matter. And, yes, if you overuse it then you might be tagged as a spammer and your web page de-listed, or diminished in rankings. But that doesn’t mean that keyword density is something you should be counting.
Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz says:
The formula for keyword density – a percentage of the total number of words on the page that are the target phrase – is indeed folly. IR scientists discredited this methodology for relevance decades ago. Early search engines and information retrieval systems already leveraged TF*IDF as a far more accurate and valuable methodology.
The Wikipedia link was added by me.
Back to keyword density. It’s not important. I’d say there are three keyword factors that are much more important than density:
- Keyword Placement
- Semantic Language Relevance
- Anchor Text
This is not necessarily in order of importance.
What I mean by placement is the location within your web page of your keywords. The Title tag is very important. It’s the most important place for your keyword. First paragraph and last paragraph are also important. H tags are disputed, but I’d say they are somewhat important. I’ll stop there.
Semantic language relevance is a reference to the use of synonyms within a web page document. If you are writing about fighter planes and you mention Tomcats, Messerschmitts and Skytrains then those words will do more to rank your web page for the term “fighter planes” than using the phrase “fighter planes” with a density of 5% throughout your web page document. Don’t buy the keyword density hype.
Finally, anchor text is undisputed as a major search ranking factor. Use your keyword in your internal anchor text. It’s much more important than keyword density.
I’ll have to agree with Stephan Spencer on this one. Search engine optimization is denigrated with talk of keyword densities.
How E-books Could Become An SEO Tool
Google is starting a new service called Google Editions where it will publish and sell e-books. Consider this:
Anyway, Jessica E. Vascellaro and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg reported afterward that Google will try to establish deals with publishers, and then, “Google says its new service . . . will allow users to buy digital copies of books they discover through its book-search service.” Which should put Google into competition with Amazon and Apple.
If Google is going to compete with Amazon then it will have to do so on equal terms. That means it will have to offer previews and sample chapters for free in order to sell books. Publishers will do everything they can to ensure that their books are found in the search engines and through social media outlets. What ways could they do that?
Well, one obvious way is through SEO content. Imagine a book introduction being written with the search engine algorithms in mind, anticipating its use as the free preview. I think this is something that Google could actually promote and condone in order to court publishers at co-marketers in its digital e-book sales outlet.
What about you? Do you think this scenario is feasible?
Do You Have A Video Sitemap?
One of the most important developments the search engines ever came out with was the sitemap. It allowed all of the search engines to better crawl websites and find content for indexing. Now, Google is offering video sitemaps and I’m betting it’s going to be every bit as revolutionary as the original HTML and XML sitemaps.
A sitemap is very important for crawlability and getting indexed and ultimately for achieving high SERP rankings. It tells the search engines how many pages you have on your site and which pages are important for crawling and, more importantly, what changes you’ve made to your website since it was last crawled. A video sitemap will do the same for your video content.
You might as well face the music. Video marketing is here. And it’s only going to grow bigger. The only question you need to answer is, Are you getting on the bandwagon now or later?
How Many Links Does It Take To Rank A Web Page?
At one time SEOs talked about something called keyword density. The idea was that if you put just the right number of keywords in your content then you could rank it pretty well in the search engines. Then Google came along.
For awhile after Google became the dominant search engine, keyword density was still talked about widely. But links became so much more important and after about three years it became apparent to many SEOs that inbound links were just as important or more important than the number of keywords on your page. Some SEOs even start saying that the number and type of inbound links to your web pages were more important for ranking purposes.
In fact, links did become important. In many cases, you could rank a web page for its key terms by finding the right kind and right number of links with just the right anchor text. Today, however, that’s a bit more difficult to do.
Links are still important, but all the search engines are a bit less forthcoming about how links fit into the overall picture. The search engines used to report your links. Now they don’t. Not much any way. And it’s a lot more difficult to find out information about how your links are affecting your search rankings.
The way it looks now, links are still important. They’re as important as they ever were, but there are so many ranking factors now that it’s difficult to say that there is any one ranking factor that is any more important than any other. We could probably identify a dozen or so ranking factors that are at the top of the ranking factor food chain and inbound link anchor text is one of them. Still, when it comes to the number of links you need to rank for a keyword, your guess is as good as mine.
Is Search Engine Optimization Enough?
So you’ve done a good job getting your web pages to rank in the search engines. You’re at the No. 1 spot with several of your most important keywords and you’re in the No. 2 and No. 3 spots for several others. You’re even getting a good load of traffic from your keywords. But what about sales? Zero. Zilch. Nada. None, right?
Welcome to the Internet marketer’s eternal dilemma. You’ve learned the most important lesson the hard way. Search engine optimization is important, but it’s not the holy grail.
If you expect to make it in the world of Internet marketing, you’ve got to do more than just manage your keywords well. You’ve got to build web pages that sell products and services. You’ve got to convert traffic to sales. And if you don’t, well, then you aren’t really doing what a marketer should be doing. Simply ranking well won’t pay the bills.
Instead of focusing all of your efforts on keywords and search engine rankings, try to figure out what converts traffic to sales. If you can nail that down and still rank your pages well in the search engines then you’ll start making the money. Just don’t expect too much until then.
Do You Have The Right Keyword Mix?
Search engine optimization is a multi-tiered marketing approach. You cannot simply add a couple of keywords to your search engine marketing campaigns and think that is going to be enough. The most important thing to know about search engine optimization today is that natural language optimization, or semantic language, is the road to success.
What does that mean?
Natural language writing is a style of writing that uses keywords for text enhancement, but it is not keyword-centric. In other words, you are not writing keyword-based content. You are writing content in such a way that it reads naturally, which is the way that people talk in normal conversation. Then you spruce it up with the right mix of keywords.
How do you know what is the right keyword mix? You settle on a primary keyword. That is the keyword you ensure appears in your title headline and multiple times on your page. Then, pick a secondary keyword and a tertiary keyword. Make sure they are related to the primary keyword, but not a variation of it. In other words, you wouldn’t use “truck driver”, “truck drivers” and “truck driving”. You’d be better off with keywords such as “truck driver” “eighteen wheeler” and “Big Rig”.
You don’t want your secondary and tertiary keywords to overshadow your primary keyword so use them but use them sparingly. And make sure that your SEO content reads naturally, not forced.
Why Strict Keyword Densities Are No Longer Necessary
To truly understand how SEO works today you need to have an understanding of the history of SEO as a marketing strategy. Search engine optimization did not develop in a vacuum and it won’t evolve into what it will be tomorrow without the developments that are occurring today. There is a continuum and it can be traced.
To begin with, SEO did not really get its name until after Google came on the scene. Before Google, Internet marketers were optimizing their websites but they didn’t really call it that. However, that “optimization” was very primitive compared to how it’s done today.
Meta Tags, Backlinks And The Rise Of Google
At one time, pre-Google, all you had to do was add a bunch of keywords to your meta tag list and you’d rank well for those keywords. It didn’t even matter if those keywords appeared in your page content or not. You’d still rank. Hardly seems fair, does it? That’s why Google rose to such prominence as quickly as it did. The company introduced a whole new paradigm.
When Google came along, no one was interested in analyzing back links. Today, that seems intuitive, but at one time no thought it was important except for two guys with the software to make it happen.
Those two guys started Google, whose search ranking algorithm was based largely on the number of inbound links pointing to a particular web page. Soon, Internet marketers started dropping their meta tag strategy in lieu of a backlink strategy. Back links became the new currency.
From Backlinks To Semantic Natural Language
Over the years, Google has tweaked its ranking factors to include more than just an analysis of the number of inbound links to your site’s pages. Quality of links, relevancy of links and link diversity are important too. And there are more than 100 other factors Google considers as well. And then there are Bing, Yahoo!, AOL, Ask and many other search engines. Each one has their own ranking criteria.
One consideration that the major search engines look for today is natural language, or semantic language, syntax. While keywords are still important, successful web page do not need X number of one keyword phrase per Y number of words on the page, what marketers call “keyword density”. Instead, it’s important to put your keyword phrase in the right places on your page and in proximity to other important elements on the page. And to write naturally for your site visitors just as you would if keywords were not important.
In essence, the search engines are looking for the best content for every keyword phrase they rank pages for. If you stuff your pages with keywords just for a ranking then you are doing yourself and your site visitors a disservice. It’s basically shooting yourself in the foot. Trust me, that hurts.
On Page Vs. Off Page SEO: Which Is More Important?
There are SEOs today, and some of them are quite well known, who teach that link building is the most important aspect of SEO. But is it? Well, just try building links to a blank page and see what happens. I’m betting not much.
On the other hand, I’ve seen web pages rise to the No. 1 position for their targeted keywords just for their on page factors alone.
A few years ago Google fixed a problem called Google Bombing that caused certain pages to rank No. 1 on the basis of thousands of inbound links using the same anchor text. The thing was, the anchor text was seldom relevant to the page in question. We can chalk that one up to the value of link building.
Of course, it goes without saying that both on page and off page SEO are important. But, what if you had to do without one or the other? Which would you choose? You’d better say off page SEO because even if you could rank a page on the basis of inbound link anchor text alone, what value would that be for a page with no content?
There’s more to SEO than being No. 1 in the SERPs. You’ve also got to convert traffic and you can’t do that without on page content.
How Google Understands Your Search Queries
Search engine optimization is the process of writing content and designing web pages so that they have an improved chance at ranking for search queries when a person starts to look for something at a search engine. Google has become the search engine of choice for a lot of people, primarily because it has lead the way in the science of search. Its algorithm is the key to how Google understands search queries.
To truly understand how to SEO a web page, you have to have some clear idea of how a search engine ranks them and that means understanding how Google attempts to understand search queries and the intent of searchers. A Wired magazine article delves into that issue and goes into considerable detail about the history of Google’s algorithm.
Search engine optimization is not a shot in the dark. While there are no tried-and-true methods that work in all cases, if you want your web pages to rank better for the search terms you are targeting, you should at least learn how search engines work, especially Google.
Is SEO Getting Harder?
Search engine optimization seems to be getting harder and harder. Is it, or is it just my imagination?
In the early days of the Web, all you really had to do to rank a website is choose a good domain name and add the right keywords to your meta tags. You could have hundreds of keywords in your list of meta tags, even some that weren’t on your web page, and you’d rank for the key terms you wanted to rank for. Not today.
The search engines have become so much more sophisticated. And so have search engine optimizers. And there is more competition going after every keyword. It’s not easier. It’s harder.
So how can a new webmaster seeking to get his website recognized earn the rank that he desires? The first thing to do is to study a little bit about SEO. Learn what you can. If you have a business to run then you likely won’t learn everything, but you can learn enough to be able to discuss valid tactics with a real professional. Learn enough that you won’t be taken advantage of. The life of your website depends on it.
Should You SEO Your Site For Facebook?
According to WebProNews, Facebook and Microsoft are extending their relationship, which will be a big boost to Bing’s search share. Or Facebook’s search share. However you want to slice it.
This is obviously good news for Bing since Facebook is one of the Web’s most trafficked websites – more so even than Bing itself. To get the exclusive on the search feature of Facebook should do wonders for the search engine’s search share. But what will it do for website owners?
I think it could mean that search engine optimization for Bing will become even more important. It’s already important though not quite as important as SEO for Google. But I can see that this relationship with Facebook could make it just as important to optimize for Bing as for Google. That is especially true if Facebook manages to overtake Google as the No. 1 most trafficked website online.
But here’s the catch: Optimizing your web pages for Bing won’t be any different than optimizing them for Bing right now. It will just be more important.
How Phrase-Based Indexing Influences SEO
If you’ve never heard the term “phrase-based indexing” then let me give you a quick primer. The concept is based on clustering. Google’s search bot will go out and analyze pages that use certain phrases together. For instance, “baseball” and “home run”. Add to that the key phrases “base hit” and “strike out” and you’ll start to get a picture.
If a large percentage of pages on the Web that discuss baseball also use the other key phrases in the cluster then you have a high value set of phrases. Google can use this information for several purposes.
One purpose is to identify phrases that are popular among spammers. If the search engine can identify those then the spam can be filtered from the search results. But another purpose is to use the phrase clusters themselves for ranking purposes. A web page that successfully incorporates the cluster of phrases into its content could rank higher for the initial key phrase – “baseball” for instance – than a web page that simply re-uses the initial key phrases over and over again attempting to achieve the right density.
This is particularly telling because what it is really saying is that natural language writing is preferable to stilted keyword-based writing. The search engines have been treating content this way for several years. Understanding this will improve your SEO.
Do Article Spinners Work?
There is a new practice in article marketing using SEO tactics on the cheap. It’s called article spinning. The practice is simply taking an old article and putting it through a computer software program that mixes it up and changes the sentences around so search engines don’t recognize it as duplicate content. The problem is, it is duplicate content and usually the articles don’t make a whole lot of sense.
For instance, the article spinner will take a sentence from the third paragraph and make it the opening paragraph. It might even exchange a keyword for another pre-selected keyword. Then it will take a sentence from the bottom of the article and make it the second sentence while moving the first sentence of the original article to the third sentence spot and thus forming a new paragraph.
The article spinner rearranges the entire article this way. And marketers actually use them.
I’m not going to say that the articles are poorly SEOd. By bot standards, the SEO isn’t bad. But the writing is usually horrendous. I don’t know how people make money with these articles, but some do.
It’s almost always better to use original articles. Original content in any format is always best. The search engine optimization will almost always be better, but the writing, which is always for humans any way, will nearly always be a big step up. And your reputation will go along with it.
Will SEO Ever Die?
Veteran folk rocker Neil Young sang a popular song in the 1970s and 1980s that went something like this:
Hey hey, my my
Rock and roll will never die
Later, King Missile made a hit with a song titled “Rock and Roll Will Never Die.” The message has become a clarion call for rock musicians who want the romantic dream to live forever.
SEO is no romantic dream (and some would argue neither is rock and roll), but you could apply this message to it just as well. SEO is a marketing tactic for online businesses that involves writing your web content in such a way that search engines rank that content against other web pages for specific keywords. If you do it well then you rank high. Bottom line.
The reason SEO will live forever is because search engines rely on content. Searchers thrive on it. Robots feed on it. Webmasters provide it. If you provide what human searchers need and what search engine robots feed on then you’ll always be in business. SEO is a necessary tool for doing business online.
2010 Search Engine Optimization Goals
Happy New Year! Welcome to 2010. Have you established any search engine optimization goals for this year?
It might seem like an academic exercise to establish goals for SEO, but it’s really not. If you want your search engine optimization efforts to be successful then you’ve got to have a plan and you’ve got to work your plan. That requires setting some goals.
The first step to successful goal setting is to analyze where you are now. What got you here? Have you been tracking your progress?
Some of the important SEO metrics to keep an eye on include:
- Search engine saturation
- Number of inbound links
- Keyword rankings
- Page rankings per keyword
- PageRank
- Traffic count (visitors, unique visitors, etc.)
- Bounce rate
These are not the only metrics that are important, of course, but it’s a good start. Figure out where you stand right now then chart a course for where you want to be by year’s end. Goalsetting is not a difficult task, but it is an essential one – even for search engine optimization.
Why SEO Is Still Important
You might think, with all the talk of social media, real-time, and video/viral marketing, that SEO is not as important as it used to be. Don’t be fooled. It’s still as important as ever and, if anything, is more important than it ever was.
There are two things more than anything else that influence the importance of SEO – increased competition and search engine policies.
Regarding competition, there’s not a lot you can do other than try to out-optimize your competition. That requires some competitive intelligence, but it also requires some aggressive search engine marketing and keyword research. You need to know what people are searching for and how you can meet the demand for information better than the other guys. That’s a bit of a no-brainer.
The tough one is search engine policies. They change, and they can change drastically. Sometimes without much notice. But they rarely change in ways that are unforeseen and illogical.
For instance, in the past couple of years we’ve seen the search engines go from offering 10 blue links of organic results to offering a handful of organic links along with images, video results, and listings from other verticals. Savvy web marketers should have seen that coming. The rise of the verticals almost ensured that would happen. And people demanding better search results all around was a huge factor as well. Plus, it just makes sense. People searching for information on a given topic may not necessarily be looking for a website – they could be looking for a video or an image.
So, search engines change. And that means SEO can sometimes change. But, again, it rarely changes in ways that can’t be unforeseen or that are totally illogical. Just because your friends are going social doesn’t mean that SEO isn’t still necessary. It is – now more than ever.
Why Internal Links Are Important Too
Test question: Which links are more important (multiple choice):
- a. Outbound links?
- b. Inbound links?
- c. Internal links?
No, it’s not a trick question. The answer is, All of the above. Sorry, that wasn’t an option. You pass by default.
All links serve a purpose. It isn’t merely navigational. Outbound links can send traffic to other websites and cause the people you want to buy your widgets to leave in mass droves. But that’s not what you want, is it? Still, carefully placed outbound links can serve a useful SEO purpose.
Inbound links, too, can benefit you in your search engine optimization goals. As well, internal links can be SEO gold.
In fact, internal links are just as important as inbound links for SEO purposes. Both are better than outbound even though outbound links can be good for SEO. Internal links with the proper anchor text can pass just as much SEO link building juice and inbound links and are easier to get. That’s why an internal navigation structure for your website is the No. 1 link building method for most SEOs. It should be for you too.
Local Search Zeitgeist
Do you know what people in your city are searching for? Are they searching for the local sports team or hero? Or for the local elementary school?
Interestingly, in many of the largest urban centers in the nation, local searchers are searching for schools. Big surprise there, right? I mean, people do place a high level of importance on their children’s education.
Google publishes its Zeitgeist report every year around this time and this year they’ve got the most popular local searches for some specific cities. And you’d like to know the methodology behind it all, well …
To compile these local lists, we found the most popular searches for each selected city and then ranked them based on how unique they were to that city. A query is “unique” if it is disproportionately popular in a particular city compared to the rest of the country. This method explains why popular local searches (for example, for a specific movie theatre) may appear higher than a term for which people across the country are searching (for example, for a regional sports team).
The one theme that I do find recurring in most of the cities on the list is that people are searching for local high school and elementary schools and colleges. Beyond that, the searches are truly local.