The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

It used to be that all you had to do was write a decent page of keyword-based content, add some meta tags, and then start building links. If you were even halfway good at it, you could expect to achieve respectable rankings. SEO is a lot harder now.

Specifically, on-page SEO is a lot harder now. And it’s getting harder.

What’s making on-page SEO so hard? Why is it getting harder?

There are several reasons why on-page SEO is getting more difficult with each passing day. For starters, Google changes its search algorithms more than 50 times a day, so it’s near impossible to keep up with the changes.

Secondly, there are so many search factors to keep up with that no one can feasibly master them all. And we can’t be sure any more just how much weight is given to specific on-page factors such as keyword density, keywords in subheads, meta tags, page titles, etc. Plus, the addition of schemas and structured data means that some SEO factors may be subject to certain conditions and your rankings may or may not have to do with anything related to those conditions.

For instance, all else being equal, if you use a particular bit of structured data and your competitor doesn’t use any, your competitor could still rank higher for you on some search queries even if you rank higher than him on others.

SEO is getting to be more and more subjective all the time – subjective in the sense that each page is judged on its own merits without consideration for what’s going on in other parts of the web.

There are basics to on-page SEO that every webmaster should pay attention to, but beyond those, your best bet is to test, experiment, and measure. No two web pages are a like and no two search queries are either.

Many SEOs are still selling spam links to their customers. These are links sold under the guise of “link building.” The problem is, they don’t really provide any link juice. Google has shut them down, which means you should avoid them like the plague.

1. Article marketing – Article marketing used to be the bomb. Then it bombed. Google killed article marketing when it began penalizing article directories for content spam. Link spam went with it. Essentially, if you write articles just for the link value, then you won’t get any link value.
2. Paid footer links – You get an e-mail from someone who wants to buy space on your blog. They offer you a nice price for a site-wide link, but it’s not related to your niche. So where do you stuff it? In your footer. No one clicks those links, right? Right. And Google pretty much ignores them. They could even penalize you if they detect that paid link.
3. Web directories – Like article marketing, web directories used to be high value links. Then everyone started doing it and there went the neighborhood. These days, very few directories are good for links and the ones that are are highly specialized and probably require some form of payment.
4. Social bookmarking sites – Two years ago social bookmarking sites were great for links. Not any more. They went by way of directories and articles. Low value if any at all.
5. Forum spam – I’m surprised there are people still doing this. Don’t set up a profile in a forum just to get links. It doesn’t work.
6. Blog comments – Blog comments are cool if you provide value to the discussion. If you are just commenting to get a link, guess what? The search engines know it.
7. Profile spam – So you heard about a new social networking site. It’s popular and gaining users faster than Google can ban link spammers. So you join, add a profile, and link to every site you own. Bad idea. You just wasted your time.

Doing things just to get a link rarely works. Add value and you’ll get the link you want. Be sure to add value.

In light of the Penguin update you’ve probably been hearing a lot about quality content. In fact, since the first Panda update, every SEO in the world has come out in favor of quality content. It makes you wonder if they were in favor of quality before they got beat down. They certainly weren’t talking about it then.

So why are they talking about it now?

SEOs have always been interested in whatever is going to make their websites rank higher in the search engines. At one time that meant counting keywords and focusing on keyword density. Even after it was evident that keyword densities didn’t work, many SEOs kept advising their clients to count keywords anyway.

Then there was link counting. And anchor text manipulation. Link building became a spam game between SEOs to see who could acquire the most and the best links. Many of them won. Then along came Panda.

Getting boinked isn’t fun. Especially if it costs you money. But if you focus on producing quality content, then you don’t have to worry about getting boinked. And this hasn’t changed. Quality today means the same thing it meant in 1998. The only thing that has changed is that now every SEO on the planet wants to focus on it.

Quality content means writing content that your readers want to read. It means providing useful and valuable information on a topic that is important to your audience. If you can do that, you’ll rank for the right key terms.

A new study shows that Facebook would earn 22% of the search market share immediately if it launched a search engine right now, today. This actually brings up two questions for me.

1. No. 1, why doesn’t Facebook have an adequate search feature then?
2. And, two, what if the search engine just wasn’t any good? Would that share drop off considerably once users decided they didn’t like it?

Of course if Facebook did have its own search engine, that would strain its relationship with Bing. I can’t see that Bing and Facebook would continue to have the relationship they have now if Facebook were to develop its own search engine. So I’m not sure that’s going to happen.

Thirdly, if Facebook had 22% of the market starting out and it did build a search engine that people would use, it would likely siphon off some market from Bing. It could very well end up at the 40% market share neighborhood and leave Bing flailing like Yahoo!

Building a search engine is a difficult thing to master. Certainly, 22% of the share of the search market would put Facebook at No. 2 in the search engine competition. However, creating value in search is not easy to do as both Yahoo! and Bing have discovered.

I’m not saying Facebook shouldn’t build its own search engine. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be good if they did. I am saying that simply building one wouldn’t necessarily mean it would be good.

What do you think? Should Facebook build its own search engine? Would it be worth trying if they did? Would you use it? And one more question: How would that affect search engine optimization practices?

Do you know the most important on-page optimization element? Is it internal links? H1 tags? Meta Description (is that even on-page?)? Your primary keyword? Secondary keyword? Or maybe it’s your page title?

Yesterday I stumbled across a web page that ranked No. 1 in its niche for the keyword the author was targeting. When I clicked View Source to check out what was under the hood on that page I discovered a div tag with the element title “hidden SEO”. It was followed by a long line of keywords, keyword phrases, and other SEO content. Could that have been the reason the page ranked No. 1?

Possibly. But even so ….

I wouldn’t put my life on it. That wasn’t the most important on-page optimization element.

So what is?

The most important on-page optimization element for any page you build for your website is the actual content on the page. If you think that’s vague, try building a web page with no words on it. Just build a sidebar with widgets. Does it look good? Do you think it will rank? Now add a link. Nothing more, just a link. Better now? How about adding a video. No description, just a video. Think you’ll make money with that?

I could go and on, but the point is real simple. A web page with no words, no content, no message that intrigues, entertains, enlightens, informs, educates, or sparks a call to action is not really optimized. It’s just there.

Thanks to all those SEO books that came out over the past 10 years there are a lot of small business owners who are making SEO mistakes over and over again. They don’t know they’re making mistakes. They’re doing things the way their SEO taught them to. But the problem is the Internet, and the search engines, have changed a lot in the last decade.

Here are 5 big SEO mistakes that most small business owners are still making:

1. Key stuffing – This is the practice of adding too many keywords to your web pages so that you rank higher for those keywords. The problem is, if the search engines catch on that you are putting too many keywords into your content, then you will lose rankings.
2. Spammy links – Many webmasters and small business owners are still chasing spammy links. Many are still using article marketing techniques from 5 or 10 years ago. These usually lead to spammy links. What will happen is the search engines will discount those links, so all your efforts to acquire them was wasted.
3. Lack of link diversity – In your effort to rank well for your pet keywords you end up using the same anchor text for your links over and over again. Search engines like to see diversity in anchor text.
4. Buying links – Here’s another big one. Many small business owners get roped into buying links. If they are found out, they will likely have their sites de-indexed.
5. Duplicate content – Are you still using article directories and taking articles that other people are using too? They won’t rank. How about plagiarizing? I am amazed to see how many small business owners lift content from other websites. This will hurt your business.

1. If you want to make your SEO better, start by avoiding these common SEO mistakes.

An SEO company conducted an experiment with a well done control test that sheds some light on the connection between organic search rankings and social media promotion. The conclusion is that Google+ promotion increases search rankings. I think there may be some nuances this test doesn’t touch on, but it looks pretty reasonable to me that they’ve drawn the right conclusion.

I have noticed that Google+ is a good reputation management tool.

If you look at the results of the study, they seem to indicate that acquiring new Google+ followers is the best activity for increasing one’s search engine rankings, but that could be misleading. The results are based on gaining just 100 new followers. Would the results be the same if the number of new followers were 1,000? How about 5,000?

Next in line for increasing search engine rankings is getting +1s. It actually makes sense that getting more +1s would increase search engine rankings. This doesn’t surprise me at all.

That Facebook promotion actually does increase Google rankings does surprise me a little bit. But I’m glad to see that it happens. Facebook has done a lot to make itself a walled garden so a lot of your activity isn’t measured by Google. Evidently, Likes and shares are.

Tweets and retweets can also increase search engine rankings, but only by a smidgen. The only thing that surprises me about this is that the results are much lower than expected. I’d have thought that Twitter promotion would do more to increase search engine rankings.

Finally, simply acquiring new Twitter followers not only doesn’t help, but there was a slight decrease in search engine rankings. That’s another surprise. But this might not have anything to do with Twitter. If no other social media activity took place, then the slight decrease in search engine rankings might have been as a result of that lack of activity.

Given these results, it seems to reason that if you engaged in Google+, Facebook, and Twitter promotions simultaneously, then your search engine rankings should improve relative to the amount of activity engaged by your competition. Nice test. I’m glad someone undertook it.

One of the good things about Google is that it is constantly updating its indexing and ranking practices to make its search engine better. This of course has some drawbacks. One of those drawbacks is that the search index itself will never be perfect.

Chris Crum at WebProNews illustrates how Google’s freshness update doesn’t always return the most relevant search result for a particular search query. By the same token, freshness also means that Google won’t always return the most recent search result possible for any given search query.

That last point is mentioned in this 10-point list on SEOmoz.

Google’s freshness update makes it more difficult to engineer effective search engine optimization campaigns. But I wouldn’t use that as an excuse not to try. I’m just saying that freshness makes it more difficult to guess how Google will react to the ever-changing landscape of content marketing.

For any given query, Google could return the most relevant-but-dated search results, the most recent search results that come close to matching, or a mixture of the two. We hope that most of the time it will be a mix.

While freshness changes things for Internet marketers and SEOs, it doesn’t change a lot. Our job is still to write the best content we can create about the topics we are writing about. If we do that well and we can beat the competition, then we should get search engine rankings for the short term as well as for the long term.

Google’s latest algorithm update is now starting to be called Penguin. At first it was an unnamed update that Google said was necessary to combat webspam. It’s interesting that now they’ve decided it needs a name.

There is a huge difference between an overoptimized website and a website that relies on spam for rankings. You can be one without being the other. I’m sure Google knows that.

But that doesn’t mean that overoptimization is excusable. You may have crossed a line, but it wasn’t a big line.

So what is overoptimization, exactly? In my mind, an example of overoptimization would be too many keywords. It’s when you focus so heavily on keywords that you end up chasing the keywords and therefore include too many on your web page. Maybe you didn’t go so overboard that you are a spammer. Maybe you just went a little overboard.

Overoptimization happens when fairly innocent Internet marketers try to hard to achieve the right rankings.

Sometimes overoptimization can simply be an aggregate of a lot of small errors. Maybe you have too many keywords in your domain name and too many on your web page, plus your inbound links are all using one keyword so you have no link diversity. The key is to scale back on your use of keywords and use a level head where your content is concerned.

If you write content for human readers rather than robots, you shouldn’t have an overoptimization problem. And you definitely won’t have a spam problem.

Google has always had it out for webspam. After all, it dilutes the search engine’s search results and makes it difficult for real quality content to rank as high as it should. That’s why webmasters should kill the spam before Google does.

Yesterday Google announced another algorithm update that will address some of the ongoing webspam issues. In January, the company addressed content quality with an algorithm that punished web pages with too many ads at the top.

It behooves you to keep an eye on what Google, and all the search engines, are up to so that you don’t run afoul of their policies. By keeping your site “clean” – or free of spam – you increase your chances of ranking well for your keywords.

Many an innocent business owner has found herself slipping in rankings because of some algorithmic change that addressed a problem that the business owner didn’t know was a problem. You might think you are following search engine guidelines only to discover that the practices you’ve been engaged in are practices the search engines don’t favor.

The best way to protect yourself from algorithmic changes that make your site good today and not-so-good tomorrow is to follow the search engine blogs and stay up-to-date on their policies. But if you can’t do that – admittedly, it is nearly a full-time task – then hire an SEO firm that does keep on top of industry changes and tries to steer clear of objectionable practices.

SEO is ever-changing. It requires daily practice and daily monitoring.

Have you ever checked your referral logs or analytics and saw a search query that someone found your site for and wondered why you ended up ranking for that search term? Have you ever seen that search query show up more than once in your referral logs and analytics reports? If you’re like me, I’m sure you have.

What happened?

SEO Theory’s Michael Martinez says this.

Search engines don’t stop ranking your pages at the end of your list of carefully chosen keywords. If they find expressions your page is relevant to that you didn’t think of, they’ll give you some exposure you didn’t count on. The difference between a real long tail strategy and a faux long tail strategy is the absence of popular head terms in your search goals.

What most business owners, and even a lot of SEOs, don’t understand is that the magic that happens in search happens when the searcher enters a search query in the search query box and clicks the Search button. It does NOT happen when you optimize your web page.

So what does that mean exactly?

Well, you can optimize your pages endlessly, do all the keyword research you can think of, and build link after link after link with the very best anchor text possible and still get traffic for search queries you didn’t think of. That happens because search engine robots are looking for content that matches search queries. They are not looking for search queries that match your content.

That’s an important distinction. But what does it mean in terms of search? Here’s what I think it means:

Quit chasing keywords. Instead, chase the customers that are important to your business – the ones most likely to buy your products and services. You cannot guess every search query those customers will use to find you on the Web. What you can do is write great content that attracts the people you want to do business with. Then promote that content where those people hang out.

Funny how so many people are willing to tell you how to optimize a web page but they can’t do it themselves. They’ve read the book, they know all the right things to say, but where are their rankings?

They don’t have any.

Real SEO is not about chasing keywords. Keywords are important, yes. But if you can’t rank a web page without doing keyword research, then you probably aren’t doing your SEO right. Stop it.

Search engine optimization is about creating opportunities. It’s not about following 10-year-old advice as if it is today’s recipe.

So now the big question is, How do you create opportunities with search engine optimization? Glad you asked.

What world class copywriters do is study copywriting techniques. They write headlines that grab readers’ attentions. Then they write content that people want to read. And they do it so well that you wish you had written it. On any given day a good online copywriter can get their content to rank for hundreds of keywords. They write content that matters.

Instead of chasing keywords, try instead to write as keywords don’t matter. Don’t just pick a popular phrase that a lot of other people have written about and write a post about it. Instead, write a post about something that people in your niche want to know about. Write it without worrying about what keyword to use.

I’m not saying keywords are not important. What I am saying is that bad content can’t be saved by keywords. Learn to write good content before you try to spruce it up with keywords.

One of the most important parts of search engine optimization is also the part that is most often downplayed by the SEO community and by webmasters in general. Almost everyone is fixated on the technical aspects of SEO – keyword research, keyword density, meta tags, alt tags, etc. But you don’t often hear about how important creativity is in the SEO process.

When I speak of creativity, what I’m really talking about is bringing something unique to web pages. That’s something unique in the web design as well as in the content delivery.

Creativity is important in the SEO process because it makes your website unique, not only to visitors but also to the search engines. You want to feed the robots with information the can’t find somewhere else. You can do that in one of two ways.

The first way to be unique in your content is to provide information that no one else provides. That’s a bit difficult, but it can be done. You want to look for opportunities to bring to light information that no one else has access to or has left ignored. If you can do that, then you can take advantage of the creative aspect of search engine optimization by providing unique information.

The second way to present unique content is in the presentation. This one is much easier to implement than the first method. You can take care of the presentation by focusing on web design, site structure, or content presentation elements on the page – for instance, use of videos, infographics, or other interesting visual and non-visual content delivery elements. You can also add rich snippets to your page to increase your search engine optimization possibilities.

Creative SEO can be handled in any number of ways, but it’s a very important aspect to SEO in the 21st century. Make your website unique.

Is there an SEO activity that is more important than all the others? Is it link building? Social networking? Writing meta tags? Keyword research? Looking over analytics reports?

Actually, it’s none of those. The most important SEO activity that you can perform at any time is content creation.

That’s right. As simple as it sounds, content creation is no mundane activity. It is the heart and soul of SEO. Without quality content there is nothing else that you can do that can make your website’s SEO effective.

All the link building in the world is fruitless if you aren’t producing quality content on a regular basis. What good is analytics without content? Why are you networking if you have no content? Meta tags without content is senseless. Yet, many webmasters spend a great deal of their day engaging in one or more of the above activities without producing any new content.

When you produce new content for your website you are telling your website visitors and the search engines that you take their concerns seriously. I’d rather spend an hour writing more content than two or three hours on each of the other activities combined.

If you aren’t creating new content every day – even if it’s just one article – then you aren’t really doing SEO.

I have to admit that when I read the title of this article at SiteProNews I thought, “OK, here’s another shallow article on how domain names are the Holy Grail of SEO. Isn’t that so 2005?”

After reading the article I have to agree with its premise.

Much has been said of link building, link baiting, and other here-today-gone-tomorrow SEO schemes. But Google always seems to find a way to make these “hot” SEO tactics not so hot after a series of algorithm changes. But one thing Google has never seemed to target for limitation is the domain name. It could very well be the most important SEO ranking factor long term.

I like the way the author puts it in these paragraphs:

Many SEO experts would suggest high quality backlinks from keyword related authority sites to be the overriding factor for high rankings. Others would suggest, in the new improved Panda-Empowered Google, on-page and on-site metrics are now the most important ranking factors to be considered for high listings.

However, I would suggest another old ranking factor, which is still one of the most over-riding factors for getting those top listings in Google. Simply put, having the exact keywords or keyword phrase in your domain name and title, is the most important ranking factor.

Unlike other SEO ranking factors, domain names are a tight security against fluctuating algorithms intended to kill search engine spam. Just by putting your exact keyword phrase – your primary phrase – in your domain name and ensuring that your website is full of high quality content, that alone is a goldmine of search ranking potential. In many cases, link building isn’t even necessary. I’ve seen sites rank on that alone.

The key is in choosing a keyword phrase that accurately depicts what your site is about without getting cute. Then, filling that website’s pages with high quality content which also targets that keyword phrase without going into excess.

Domain names are like real estate. If you build your business on the most desirable corner in a city, then you will no doubt get tons of traffic. People will stop in to see what you are about. And the real estate is limited. In the same way, a domain name can be like that street corner. Its value can increase according to market demand and the limitations imposed on the space.

Do it well and your domain name can serve you for years to come.

If you had any lingering doubts that search engine optimization was still a valid form of marketing, you can put them to rest right now. According to WebProNews, search is up by 68% since 2008.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone really. While the hype these days is around social media, search is still getting a lot of air play.

The interesting thing is that Microsoft, or Bing, has gained the most ground in that time. Google has already increased the number of searches it gets. In fact, it’s share of the search market is almost 70%. Bing’s is just under 20%. And Yahoo!’s is falling.

For the first time in search history, Bing is actually No. 2 in terms of total market share. Yahoo! has fallen to No. 3.

And here’s another surprise: A few people are still using AOL.

What all this boils down to is that more people are searching for information online through search engines than ever before. That means that search engine optimization is no less important than it ever was. In fact, I’d say it’s more important now than it ever has been. And that will likely increase even more going into the future.

So let’s answer the all-important question: Why? Why is search growing?

I think it really boils down to one thing. More and more people are using the Internet. As the younger generation gets older that means more people enter into the information market. And older people are going online more and more each day as well. All that spells a huge increase in search driving up demand for professional search engine optimization.

Where people are searching there is a need for more information. That means you should be putting your marketing money into search. Even now.

If you don’t have a huge budget but you still want to take advantage of the benefits of link building, there are ways you can build solid links to your website or blog without spending a lot of time or money on the effort. It does, however, take some creativity.

The first step is to ask for guest bloggers to write content for your blog. Set up a Guest Blogger page on your blog and get people to sign up to be a guest blogger. Then, give them some sample post titles to write, but be willing to accept other types of posts as well. Keep an open mind. But one thing you don’t want to sacrifice on is quality. Insist that all content you publish is high quality content.

Be sure to promote your guests posts through your social media accounts. Then follow those guest bloggers on their social media accounts. Retweet their tweets, Like their posts, and build that relationship.

After you’ve built your relationships, cash in. Ask those fellow bloggers if you can write a guest post on their blog. When you do, use the rel=author tag to link your guest posts to your Google+ account (you do have one, don’t you?) and link your Google+ account to your guests posts. Also link those guest posts back to your blog or website, which is the inbound link that you’ve been coveting.

Building links this way won’t be fast, but it is effective and it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Most web pages that suffer from mediocre search rankings can have those rankings increased with just a few simple tweaks. In most cases all it takes is 3-5 small improvements that take less than 5 minutes each to fix. Here are 5 very small web page improvements you can make to better your website’s SEO in less than 30 minutes.

• Alt tags – Got a photo or image that you are adding to your page? Include an alt tag. Make sure that your alt tag uses your primary keyword for that page. The alt tag is to notify the search engines that the photo is there and what it is about. It will definitely increase your SEO to have alt tags on all your images.
• Inline JavaScript – This kills so many web pages that it’s not even funny, especially if the JavaScript is at the top of the web page’s code. Take that inline JavaScript and put it into an external file, then call it into your web pages with a single line of code. That alone should increase your web visibility because search engines don’t crawl JavaScript and you want to watch your code-to-text ratio.
• Unique meta descriptions – If you have two or more web pages with the same or similar meta descriptions, rewrite the meta descriptions until they are all unique.
• Keywords in subheads – Subheads are often overlooked in pages with lots of text, but if you add subheads every third or fourth paragraph and ensure you have your keywords in those subheads, then that will go a long way to optimizing your web pages.
• Optimized meta title – Like the meta description, a unique meta title can do wonders for your on-page SEO. Don’t just take your page’s headline and make it your meta title. Instead, write a unique meta title using the same keyword that is in your headline.

If you follow these 5 simple steps, you should find your on-page SEO improving your search rankings almost immediately.

It’s important to go back through your website and search it out for items that might be a red flag for the search engines. That might mean creating a new sitemap once in a while.

Duane Forrester of Bing says as much in an interview conducted late last year.

Your Sitemaps need to be clean. We have a 1% allowance for dirt in a Sitemap. Examples of dirt are if we click on a URL and we see a redirect, a 404 or a 500 code. If we see more than a 1% level of dirt, we begin losing trust in the Sitemap.

In other words, if you have a website with 20 pages on it and you have 2 of those pages with 301 redirects, 1 with a 404 error, and 1 that returns a constant 500 error, then your sitemap could be killing your search rankings in Bing.

A 500 error usually refers to some kind of server issue. It’s not likely that you’ll get a 500 error on one page and not on another, but it could happen. If you recently changed permissions on one page of your website and failed to change it back to the original permissions setting, then that page could turn a 500 error.

A 404 error means that the server couldn’t find your page. There is likely something wrong with the permalink in your sitemap.

All of this is simply to say that you should present a clean sitemap to the search engines if you expect them to honor it. If it’s been a while since you’ve created your 301 redirects, use the rel=canonical tag and delete those pages from your server. You can then also delete the redirects from the sitemap. But make sure those pages are not indexed in the search engines first.

And of course you want to fix any errors as well – 404s, 500s, etc. Fix the errors and reduce the number of 301 redirects in your sitemap. Keep it clean.

SEOmoz posted an interesting take on Google Places yesterday. The gist of the article tells how some local businesses have had their Google Places listing disappear because they don’t actually service customers at their location. That’s a slap in the face to many home-based businesses. It could happen to you.

Thankfully the article tells how to avoid that fate. Dare I let the cat out of the bag?

OK, you talked me into it. The key is to hide your local address. Yes, hide it. As in, make it invisible.

That could very well diminish your local search results, but if your Google Places listing is de-activated, then that will happen anyway.

Casting aside any temptation to make Google look like a bad guy, I’d like to instead ask you a question. Do you really need a Google Places listing? If you do any business locally, then I’d say you should have one. But is it the end of the world if your address isn’t visible? Do you really think it will make or break your local business?

With all the marketing channels available to small businesses today, I wouldn’t fret over one channel. You have to figure out how many of your local prospects would actually visit your Google Places listing. If your business is rural, it may not be that many. On the other hand, if you operate in a large metropolitan area, it could be much higher.

Like any marketing channel, you must ask yourself how important it is to your business. Then, act accordingly.