The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

If Google Panda and Google Penguin taught you anything, it should have been not to chase the algorithms.

A lot of search marketers spend the bulk of their time trying to figure out search engine algorithms and playing to those. They’ll test this and test that, then implement a new search strategy or link building strategy based on guessing what’s important to Google or Bing. This is a waste of time.

I’m not saying don’t run tests. But don’t rely on tests as a final authority on accurate search ranking. Algorithms can change. And they often do.

Instead, focus your content on your end user. Who do you want to attract to your website? Well, then write your content for that person. If you write your content with one person in mind who serves as the ideal customer, then you’ll get a lot farther in terms of marketing your website. Search rankings generally take care of themselves if you write your content with the end user in mind.

I’m not saying don’t optimize your content. You should use your keywords, write good titles and subheads, include alt tags, and take care of the basic SEO elements. But don’t make them the most important elements on your page.

The most important thing to good search engine rankings are your site visitors. What do they want? Give it to them.

A lot of sites today are falling in the search rankings because they have duplicate content issues. Now more than ever, duplicate content is causing major issues with search rankings. The good news is, in most of these cases, it’s a pretty easy fix.

Here are 3 reasons why your site may be suffering from duplicate content issues, and how to fix them:

1. HTTP vs. HTTPS: If you have a secure side of your website for members or because you want to keep certain information secure from people who haven’t earned access, this can cause duplicate content issues. More often than not, it’s a byproduct of your CMS and how your pages are technically handled by it. Many content management systems use dynamic URLs that look like this:
   http://www.example.com/webpage.php?booklist_id=321548

   Then, the same page is indexed using a clean URL, and you suddenly have two pages with the same information on it. Duplicate content. Tweak your CMS so that only one of those pages is indexed. This can often be done in the settings, or you can simply use a robots.txt to prevent crawling of one of the pages.

2. Same product fits into multiple categories: Another issue is you have products that are categorized in multiple categories. The search engine indexes the page under the category names, so the URLs are different but the content is the same. You can change the URLs on your website so that web pages are indexed without category names. You should also consolidate the pages and use 301 redirects to maintain the traffic.
3. Language-specific pages: If you have your content translated, then you might have the same information on a primary page and also on the language-specific page. For instance, your English-language URL may look like this:
   http://www.example.com/en/literaryterms.html

   If that same page is also located at http://www.example.com/literaryterms.html, then you’ll have issues. Only store the content in one location and redirect one of the pages to the other.

Duplicate content issues are easy to fix in most cases. Don’t let them get you down.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, often takes questions from people and answers them via video. WebProNews featured one of these questions from Cutts recently regarding synonyms in your content.

Regarding the use of synonyms in your on-page content, Matt Cutts makes the following comments:

• Use both words, “without sounding artificial or stilted or spammy”
• “Make sure that you mention, in a natural way, that you are good at both of those”
• “Maybe once it’s a USB drive, and the next time it’s a USB stick, and at the bottom of the page it’s a flash drive”
• Read the text aloud and ask, “Does it sound stilted? Does it sound artificial?”
• “Try to use the words in a natural way as long as it doesn’t go too far, and people start to notice that it sounds weird”

Notice how many times he used the words “natural,” “artificial,” and “stilted.” He even used “spammy” once, and “weird.” The idea is to use natural language writing techniques to cover the topics you write about online. That is, write as if you were writing about your topic and search engines didn’t exist.

If you use the same keyword phrase over and over again in your content, then it will likely sound artificial or spammy. You don’t want that. So you do want to substitute your keyword phrase a few times with something that is synonymous. You want to do that so that your writing does come across as natural and not stilted. But here’s the catch – if you replace your primary keyword phrase too often and use too many synonyms just for the sake of using synonyms, then it will sound unnatural.

So the key is to find that balance, that in-between place, where you focus on your primary keyword but substitute it for a synonym in certain places so that your content flows smoothly from beginning to end.

I’ve heard more than a few arguments about whether or not long or short content is best for online marketing. To tell the truth, I think it’s a losing argument no matter which side you’re on.

The advocates of short content take that approach because they believe that people won’t read long form content. The truth, however, is that people will read long form content if it is good. They won’t read it if it is not good, but they won’t read short form content if isn’t good either.

Advocates for long form content argue that search engines have more to feed on with long content. The more content you have the more queries you can rank for. That’s true. But if the content isn’t worth reading, ranking well for it won’t matter. You’ll get a lot of bounces if you get traffic at all.

The key to any and all content, whether short or long, is to make it good. Quality content is the best content.

So does that mean that size doesn’t matter? Not really. Size matters if you want to increase your chances at ranking for more search queries, but you have to take the time to do your research and write content that deserves to rank well. That means writing content that people want to read. If you can consistently produce high quality content in long form, then you should do well online.

More and more, I’m seeing top-notch SEO experts – people who have been the top leaders in SEO and Internet marketing for more than ten years – saying that chasing keywords is no longer an SEO best practice. That just doesn’t seem right, but I’ll have to agree with them. If you want to rank well in the search engines going into 2013, I recommend focusing on high quality content without the keyword spam.

What do I mean by that?

Jill Whalen has an article at SiteProNews listing 18 former SEO best practices that could now work against you. I think this is a very important list.

Right in the middle of her article, however, is this paragraph:

Today, and for the foreseeable future, SEO is much less about optimizing for specific keywords, and much more about technical issues, social signals, and the overall trustworthiness of a company and its website.

Pay attention here because this is real important. The emphasized phrases are mine.

Trust: The New SEO

If you aren’t optimizing for specific keywords, then what are you optimizing for? Answer: Trust. That’s it. Your new buzzword going forward is trust. That’s the new SEO.

Does that mean you can’t use keywords? No, not at all. It does mean that your keywords should not be the focal point of your content. The needs of your readers should be the focal point of your content with the end goal of earning and building trust at the forefront of your thinking process.

In reality, this is the way it should have always been. Keywords can get your site ranked, though going forward this is questionable, but they won’t build trust in your brand. Only high quality content that meets the needs of your readers can do that.

Forget about stuffing keywords into your content, building back links with anchor text, and other manipulative SEO tactics. Just write great content. That’s your new SEO strategy.

More and more, I see websites ranking for key terms that don’t appear in their title tags and that don’t have any measurable inbound anchor text using that specific key term for which they are ranking. And in many cases the key term isn’t anywhere on the page. I’m not the only person who has noticed this.

So what’s happening?

Rand Fishkin does a good job of explaining about co-citation, which makes a lot of sense actually. We’ve looked at another type of citation that Google has become adept at using for SEO purposes in the local space as it relates to Google Places. Maybe Google is taking what it has learned from Google Places citations and applied it across the Net as a whole. That wouldn’t surprise me.

SEO is changing, folks. What used to work isn’t working any more for a lot of people. That doesn’t mean that anchor text, title tags, and other classic SEO tactics are dead, or dying. What it does mean is that they may have a diminished effect in the future as Google learns to look for other clues that will help it rank web pages for specific search queries that webmasters may not necessarily be targeting.

Is this good news? I think it is. I think it could mean less spam in the search results, but I also think it will make SEO better for online marketers who want to do it right.

There is a lot of talk among SEOs about White Hat strategies and Black Hat strategies. Obviously, you want to stay away from the Black Hat SEO tactics and go with the White Hat tactics. But there’s just one problem. Every White Hat SEO tactic has the potential to become a Black Hat tactic.

I’m not being facetious. All it takes to become a Black Hat SEO is to take a White Hat technique and overdo it. Many have done it.

Google algorithm updates are full of historic swipes at large numbers of Internet marketers who learned how to SEO their websites from gurus, ninjas, and purveyors of White Hat tactics. What’s good today may be bad tomorrow in the eyes of the search engines. That’s why I advocate any SEO tactic being employed in moderation.

Too many blog comment links can be detrimental. The reason is because so many commentators are only after the links.

Take any SEO tactic that has worked for someone and you can find someone else that it has hurt. That includes simple implementations like using a keyword in your page title. It works because it’s a practice that has been recognized by the industry to get pages to rank well. BUT, there have been some cases where a web page has ranked for a search term that was not included in the page title. It happens all the time. And there are instances, as well, where search terms in page titles couldn’t save a web page from being de-listed or falling in the SERPs.

I’m not saying that search terms added to a page title will get your site de-listed or cause you to fall in the rankings. What I am saying is if you take a good thing to excess, then you could be considered a Black Hat SEO practitioner by the search engines.

Do the good things, but do them in moderation.

In the midst of a great article on measuring ROI in search engine optimization campaigns, Michael Martinez started talking about depreciating link values. That’s an odd way to talk about link building, isn’t it? But it’s really not – not if you consider inbound links an asset.

A Website’s intrinsic value should include the intrinsic value of the links that point to it. So I feel, anyway. Hence, if you can assign a dollar value to links you can improve your asset valuation of a Website. Furthermore, if you incorporate link decay models into your depreciation methodology you can measure a type of growth in asset value that can be used to infer future conversions over virtually any period of time.

All of that’s well and good when determining the value of a website, but what about in determining the value of a link building campaign?

In order for links to depreciate, they have to appreciate. The value of a link is not necessarily what you pay for it – and I’m not talking about buying links. No matter what kind of link building you do, you have to expend some money to do it. So how do you determine link value?

4 Ways To Determine Link Value

One way to determine inbound link value is the traffic generation method. If you can assign a value to each unique visitor and to each real visitor to your website, then you can value your inbound links by the amount of traffic generation they deliver.

The downside to this method is that it doesn’t take into consideration your search engine rankings.

Another way to determine inbound link value is to measure your search engine rankings, but that doesn’t take into consider your website traffic or conversions. It’s not a very good way to judge value because there are a lot of other factors you can’t control.

You can measure link values solely on how well they convert traffic to sales, but there are weaknesses to that model as well. Not all conversions take place the first time a link is clicked, or the first time a visitor arrives at your site. A visitor could click a link and visit your website, then visit it again through a SERP, and finally convert through a PPC ad. So what is the value of that link then?

The fourth way to measure link values is by using a combination of the above methods. The downside to doing this is that you run the risk of counting certain link qualities more than once. Still, by making an honest effort, you can close the loopholes on each method and you stand a better chance of seeing a realistic picture of your link values.

We’ve been saying for over a year now that SEO has changed dramatically for the long term. In fact, it has changed so drastically from what it used to be that it is hardly recognizable any more. Much of the advice we’ve given over the years no longer is valid. And it’s Google’s fault.

Now I’m no doomsdayer, and I’m not one who typically jumps on the SEO-is-dead bandwagon. We go through this about once a year, at least. And now there is someone else asking the same old question: Is SEO dead?

Nell Terry makes some good points, and I agree for the most part. Google isn’t changing things around just to target the SEO industry, however, they aren’t trying to make it easy for us either. They want us to get discouraged, maybe even give up. But that’s only because so much of SEO has become nothing more than spam, and Google has a valid economic interest in getting rid of the spam.

I particularly like this paragraph:

I think many techniques are outdated – think keyword placement, strict numbers games, community optimization. It’s about creating a presence in your industry and making a name for yourself in order to climb the SERPs.

What this says, and I agree, is that SEO tactics you were using two years ago probably aren’t going to work today, but that’s not a bad thing. SEOs will just have to learn to adjust. But here are three things that I think are still important, and probably always will be:

1. Great content that doesn’t stray off topic – it must be focused
2. Social signals are a big driving force today
3. Your reputation as a content producer is paramount

In light of these three hard truths, if you are an online content producer, it’s time to start thinking about author reputation. Start today.

Google has a new tool. It’s called the Disavow Link Tool. But they’ve issued a caution to webmasters not to use it unless you absolutely have to. Using it, says Matt Cutts, has its dangers. Why is that? I have to ask.

First, it’s important to point out that Google won’t necessarily take your suggestion to disavow a link just because you’ve submitted a disavow request. They reserve the right to ignore your request and continue counting the link. Nevertheless, it’s a useful tool.

The Disavow Link Tool could prove useful if you’ve done some link building that got your site penalized for bad links, or if you hired an SEO firm that used questionable link building tactics that you didn’t approve. If you do everything right and you just decide one day that you don’t want a particular link pointing at your site any more, that’s not a good reason to use the Disavow Link Tool.

One of the things you should do before you submit a disavow link request is contact a website owner and request that they remove the link to your website. If you do your due diligence and then submit your request to Google, you are more likely to have your request honored.

But there’s no guarantee.

You can learn more about Google’s new Disavow Link Tool at the Webmaster Central Blog. Honestly, though, it’s best not to engage in questionable link building practices in the first place. Don’t build bad links and you’ll never need to disavow them.

If you use WordPress as a content management system or use it for blogging on your business website, you might be wondering whether you need all those plugins that Internet marketers keep recommending, particularly the SEO plugins. Let me just say that SEO is different for every website, so any recommendation for a cookie-cutter SEO plan is a bad recommendation.

That said, there are a few SEO plugins that are good to have, but I’ve seen websites succeed without them. Here’s what I’d suggest to you if you are starting a new website today.

First, build your site and set up your blog. Make sure you employ traditional SEO tactics that are known to still work. These include optimizing your title tags, ensuring your website navigation is pure and easy to use, and managing your keywords effectively. Promote your website using social media, but be careful that you don’t become a social media and/or link spammer. Before you start adding SEO plugins, wait 30 to 60 days. Meanwhile, blog every day using your keyword list as a checklist for topics to write about.

During that 30-60 trial period, monitor your search engine rankings, traffic, and keyword referrer list. Are people finding your website for the keywords you want to be found for? Is your site indexed?

If your site does well without the SEO plugins, you may not need them. But if your site isn’t doing well after 60 days and isn’t gaining in search engine visibility, then add one plugin. Don’t add any more. Test that plugin to see if it improves your search engine visibility. If not, try another. Stop testing plugins when you see improvement. Test each one for 30 days before switching it with another plugin. If you see no improvement at all after 6 months, get rid of all SEO plugins and see how you rank for your keywords now. Chances are, you can get by without the plugins, but it’s nice to have them if you need them.

Local search engine optimization can be a challenge for many online marketers, especially if you provide the same service to multiple cities across a wider geographic area. For instance, if you are an auto mechanic that caters to several smaller cities surrounding a large metropolitan area, then you might conduct SEO campaigns for each of those cities.

This is where you want to beware, however, you can’t simply build a website for each city with the same content replacing the name of the city for each location. That would be ineffective, for sure.

There are ways to provide unique content for each location that you serve. Here are three ideas to get your imagination going:

1. Ask yourself what is different about each location. While the service you provide might be similar (in fact, they could be the same), each location might have specific needs within the overall service offerings of your business. Address those differences in your content.
2. Use different types of content. For one location page on your website, add a video. For another location page, include written testimonials from your customers. On another location page you might use a graphic from a local artist and an article or two from local writers. Use your imagination and come up with your own ways of producing original content.
3. Write a blog. With a blog, every blog post has to be different. You can address general information issues as well as specific local issues unique to each location your serve.

Publishing unique and original content for local areas is a challenge, but it’s not impossible. For better SEO, however, it is essential.

If you want to be helpful to your blog readers, then you’ve got to create useful links. There are a lot of different types of links and not all of them helpful. Here are 4 types of blog post links that are very helpful – to you and to your readers.

1. Past blog posts – By linking to previous blog posts you can increase your blog’s SEO quotient and help your readers learn more information about the topic you are writing about. It’s one of the most useful types of blog post links in your arsenal.
2. Internal website link - This type of link is a link from your blog to a page on your website. The purpose is to send your reader to a more detailed page regarding your topic. Do yourself a favor and create an anchor text link to give your website an added SEO boost.
3. Link to an external resource – Your blog should be helpful to your readers. If you aren’t linking to valuable content on a regular basis, then you’ll lose readers. One way to ensure your readers keep coming back for more is to link elsewhere to a valuable resource on a given topic. If someone else has covered a topic better than you could, link to it.
4. Call to action link – Sometimes you just want to sell something. It could a service, your own product, or an affiliate product you promote. You don’t have to link to get that coveted SEO juice. A simple “click here” or “for more information” type of link after a well done and detailed description of your product or service can get those clicks to going.

A good blog has links in it. These 4 types of blog post links can take your blog from obscurity to popularity in just a couple of months – if you employ them regularly.

Google is more than just a search engine. The big media company also has tools to help content producers come up with ideas for blog posts and other content – both on and off of your websites. Here are 6 ways you can use Google to come up with more content ideas.

1. Google AdWords External Keyword Research Tool – The AdWords External Keyword Research Tool was designed to help potential advertisers come up with ideas for targeted keywords in their ads, but it has become a great tool for webmasters to use in discovering new keywords to use in their content strategies.
2. Google Suggest – When you search Google you’ll see drop-down suggestions in the search box. These are actual phrases that searchers have used. They are the most popular searches related to the one you are trying to make, and Google Suggest shows these to you as you are typing. Take note. They are wonderful keyword suggestions for your content marketing.
3. Google+ Trending Topics – Join Google+. On your content stream you’ll see the top 5 trending topics on Google+.
4. Google Alerts – Google Alerts allows you to keep tabs of specific keyword phrases that are important to you. You’ll get an e-mail notification every time one of your keywords is mentioned anywhere online.
5. Google Trends – Recently, Google merged the old Google Trends and Insights for Search into one all new product – the new Google Trends. You can type in a keyword and see how that keyword has trended over time. You’ll see how many searchers searched for information on that topic by geo-location and other important metrics.
6. Google Zeitgeist – Google Zeitgeist is a Google report that tells what searchers looked for each year. This annual report is a great tool for coming up with new content ideas.

If you want to come up with new content ideas, try one of these Google services. Or try them all. They’re free.

If you understand your Klout score, you are in the minority. Nevertheless, despite Klout scores not being widely accepted – or at least looked at with skepticism – Bing is displaying Klout scores on its “People Who Know” bar.

Bing is doing everything it can to gain a competitive advantage over chief rival and search dominator Google. Most of it isn’t working. So why would anyone think adding Klout scores will work?

Maybe Bing doesn’t think Klout scores will give it the edge it needs to gain more search share, but that’s what they’re doing anyway. And I have to say that it won’t make me use Bing any more than I already do.

I think Bing’s search results are not bad. For the most part, they rival Google’s pretty well. But it’s important for marketers to understand that your job is to get your website indexed in the search engines and optimized for the best search results. Social signals are becoming a lot more important to help you make that happen. Klout may not be a perfect way to measure social influence, but it might be getting more difficult to ignore.

I wouldn’t say you should put your Klout score at the top of your priority list right now, but it’s looking more and more like that’s what you’re going to have to end up doing. I hope you’re ready.

What should you do when your keyword list runs out and you don’t know what else to write about? There are a number of things you could do. Today, I’m going to suggest a keyword suggestion tool by the name of Soovle.

The first thing you should notice when you arrive at Soovle is the search box in the middle of the screen surrounded by the names of 7 search engines. The 7 base search engines include:

• Google
• Amazon
• Yahoo!
• Bing
• YouTube
• Answers.com
• Wikipedia

If you type one of your search terms into the search box, you’ll get similar terms appearing over the names of each of these search engines. Click on one of those search terms suggestions at any one of the 7 search engines and you’ll be taken directly to that entry at that search engine.

This is the most basic way to use Soovle. You can click on the little red arrow under the search box to rearrange the search engines on the page. You can also click on one of the small icons below the search box to rearrange the search results so that a particular search engine is at the top of the circle around the page. For instance, click on Amazon’s icon and the Amazon results will appear at the top of the page.

Up in the top right corner of the screen you’ll see a series of links. Click on “engines” and a little pop up appears that allows you to increase the number of search engines from 7 to 11 or 15. Want to switch a search engine for another? Just drag and drop the icon into one of the dotted-lined boxes. Now make another search.

Soovle is real easy to use. It can be a good tool for coming up with additional search terms based on your primary search list.

What should you do if you discover that your website has a lot of bad inbound links? Can you delete them?

I’ll say right at the outset that it’s difficult to have your bad links removed. You’ll be a lot more effective if you create good links to offset the bad links you have out there. Diluting the effect of bad links is more effective and time efficient in the long run because the search engines measure your authority based on a cumulative effect of your overall marketing efforts online.

But if you were going to try to get those bad links deleted, how would you do it? Here’s a simple step-by-step process that I’d recommend following:

1. First, identify the bad links. Webmaster Tools is the best way to identify bad links. Some SEO tools will help you with this too. Once you identify them, create a spreadsheet of those links and where they’re located.
2. Contact the webmasters of the sites where your links are located. Don’t send out a form letter. Contact each one separately. Be personable, polite, and professional. Simply request that links to your site be removed. Many webmasters will ignore your request, but some will not.
3. Report bad links to Google and Bing through Webmaster Tools.

That’s about all you can do. You will not likely get all of your bad links removed, but you might get some of them removed. Again, your best bet is to create as many good links as you can to dilute the effect of bad links.

Search engine optimization practices have gone through a lot of changes over the years. Early on, webmasters stuffed their web pages with keywords and used meta tags extensively. It was not uncommon to view source on a page and see the meta keywords tag stuffed with hundreds of keywords even if most of them didn’t appear on the web page anywhere. And those pages ranked for those keywords too.

When Google came along, they created an entire economic system based on backlinks. Inbound linking became a new kind of currency – and spam.

Umpteen million algorithm changes later, Google looks at links in a totally different light, meta tags are pretty useless (especially the meta keyword tag), and hardly anyone knows what constitutes effective SEO any more. The game has completely changed.

But has it?

The key to ranking in the search engines has always been quality of content. Yes, you might have built inbound links, wrote impressive meta descriptions, and made sure your page title had your primary keyword in it, but the search engines still focused on the content. Was it any good and did it solve a reader problem? That’s still the case today. Quality content will win out every time.

That’s not to say that search engine spam doesn’t still exist. But if it’s spam, it will eventually disappear from the SERPs. Focus on quality. It’s the only real SEO that’s left any more.

Exact match domains have been a target of controversy in the SEO world for over a decade. There are people who are die-hard proponents of exact match domain names, then there are those who cite high profile examples of successful websites that are not exact match domains. Here are a few:

• Google
• Yahoo!
• Bing
• Alexa
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• etc.

The list could go on.

Exact Match Domains Are In Decline

SEOmoz recently conducted a study on whether or not exact match domains are in decline in SEO results. The conclusion was that they are.

The author of the blog post, however, was careful to point out that the fact that exact match domains are in decline does not necessarily mean that the search engines have targeted them in their algorithms. There could be any number of reasons for this decline. Here’s one:

I suspect that, by targeting some forms of spammy anchor text, Penguin disproportionately hit EMDs. Many people who use EMDs solely for ranking purposes are also aggressive with exact-match anchor text. The EMD drop was probably collateral damage.

Don’t Dump Your Exact Match Domain Yet

There are a number of reasons why a webmaster might want an exact match domain name. If it’s for branding purposes, then I think your chances of ranking well with your exact match domain is better – unless you engage in spammy SEO tactics.

On the other hand, if you want an exact match domain name because you think it will help you rank better in the search engines and your intent is to SEO your web pages using exact match keyword phrases and anchor text until you rise to the top, there’s a very good chance that you’ll over-SEO your website and produce the opposite effect. But that will be because of your on-page SEO spam, not necessarily due to your exact match domain.

My personal opinion is that your domain name, exact match or not, enhances what you do on your web pages. If you engage in solid SEO practices that are well received by the search engines, then your domain name can help. But if you engage in on-page spam, then it could also be considered a part of that spam.

Conclusion: Tread lightly.

If you’re on the back side of life, or approaching it, then you likely remember the old TV commercials featuring the Pepsi-Coke blind taste test. Well, Bing – the search engine – has something similar going on. In their own version of the blind taste test, Bing takes Google on and, according to its own study results, is winning.

I find this quite intriguing. I think the results depends on your search queries. I tried it on what I consider very low results search queries. That is, these are non-popular search queries that likely aren’t searched often, but when they are searched for they are searched for by a specific niche market individual who knows what they want. Bing won a round out of five and there were two draws.

Two draws! I think that’s something to brag about, if you ask me.

I suppose it’s possible that on more popular search queries, Bing could very well win. Perhaps they’re targeting the more popular search queries.

But anyway, if you care to take the Bing blind test, you can head on over to the Bing It On website and take the test for yourself.

This is an aggressive marketing tactic. But will it result in Googlers converting to Bing? Only time will tell. If it does, Bing could become a major player in the search engine war. But if not, I guess we’ll just all be stuck with Google for a little while longer.