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.
Incrementality is a term that is associated with how many PPC ad clicks are caused by a lack of similar organic results. In other words, if you have a PPC ad that targets a specific keyword phrase and you receive 100 ad clicks in the absence of an associated organic result, 50 of those are said to be incrememntal if they are not replaced by clicks on organic results when those organic results are present.
Let’s take a concrete example.
Let’s say you are targeting the keyword phrase “red banana.” If you have a PPC ad that you run periodically targeting that phrase and you get 100 clicks a day on that ad when there is no organic search result for your landing page, we’ll consider that your base of comparison. Now, let’s say you have an organic search result that appears alongside your PPC ad. If you get 50 clicks on the organic search result when it is present and 50 clicks on the PPC ad, then you do not have any incremental clicks on the ad. However, if you only get 25 clicks on the organic result and 50 clicks on the PPC ad, then 25% of your ad clicks are said to be incremental.
Google recently performed a study concerning incrementality on ad clicks.
The interesting thing about this study is that it shows that 50% of ad clicks are incremental when the advertiser has the top ranking for the targeted keyword phrase. If your organic result is in the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th positions, then advertisers’ incrementality rate is 81%. The incrementality rate is 96% for advertisers whose organic rankings are in the 5th position or lower.
While Google is careful to point out that individual advertisers will have differing results, this is a telling study. For one thing, it illustrates the importance of high organic search rankings. But it also says that PPC advertising is more important when your organic search rankings are lower.
What does it take to be good at SEO? Can you do it overnight? Is it a long-term strategy or a short-term strategy?
There is actually a lot of debate about this in SEO circles. Some SEOs are content to go on responding to Google’s frequent algorithm updates in hopes that they might figure out the secret to high rankings. Some SEOs will spend hours, days, and weeks “studying” the search engine algorithms hoping to learn how best to rank well for specific key phrases.
Is it possible? Can you study the search engines and learn the secret to rankings? Many SEOs stake their reputations on it.
The fact of the matter is that learning “the secret” to high rankings is a never-ending struggle. The best that any SEO can do is maintain a posture of good, solid content creation over time. While you might lucky and achieve excellent search engine results over the short term, the real SEO success formula is a long-term strategy. You are building websites and creating content for next decade as much as next year.
Instead of chasing algorithms, you’d do well to simply create great content and let the search engines do their thing.
Michael Martinez of SEO Theory says you should stop writing meta descriptions. Why? Because the search engines ignore them. But do they?
Yes. Sometimes they do. But many times they don’t. Which is why you should continue to write your meta descriptions.
What the search engines don’t do is use your meta descriptions to rank your websites. However, they DO use them for their snippets. Not all of the time. But much of the time. And because they do use your meta descriptions some of the time as search result snippets you should go ahead and continue to write them.
So when do the search engines use your meta descriptions for search results snippets? Typically, when it suits them. Technically, when those meta descriptions are just right for the search query.
What it really boils down to is control. Do you want Google and Bing to control what searchers see in the search results or would you prefer to have some of that control for yourself? Remember, there’s no guarantee the search engines will use your meta descriptions at all. But when they do, you want them to use the meta description that you wrote. You’d prefer that, wouldn’t you?
If you want to leave the perception of your business and your web pages to Google’s and Bing’s ability to present your information, then by all means stop writing your meta descriptions. But if you want to have some control over your reputation, then go ahead and spend a little extra time crafting a good meta description.
Social signals are becoming more and more important in search, and I mean beyond Google simply counting and weighing the importance, relevance, and authority of links.
For instance, if you are logged into Facebook, you can go to Bing and see what your Facebook friends like. On YouTube, or anywhere.
Google, in an attempt to face off with Bing, created its own social network called Google+. When you conduct a Google search, beside each search result you’ll see a +1 button. If you +1 an item and you set your preferences on Google+ just right, then your friends will be able to see what you plussed on your Google+ profile page, and you they.
But Google takes it another step further than that even. On the search results page, you can see what items your friends have shared on Google+ and you can see other items they have shared on any social network – including Facebook.
Are these social signals exhaustive? Not by any means. In fact, they are just the beginning.
Social search is in its infant stage. I believe social signals in search will become much more important and we are only getting started. It will be exciting to see where the search engines of the future will take us. I can hardly wait to get there.
Google recently updated its algorithm and the result has seen Google take some heavy criticism. Labeled the ‘Farmer Update’, the update is reported to target content farms that are full of poor quality content. In the lead up to this update, much was said about Design Media, in particular it’s content site eHow. Reports to date suggest that eHow probably benefited more than it lost following the update.
At the same time, there are many sites crying poor because they copped a hit in search results. These are sites that are businesses and who have good reputations within the online community, certainly not ‘content farms’. The problem is, their sites have internal flaws which, to Google’s algorithm, look like content farms.
The problem with the algorithm change is a simple one. Just because you’re a content farm that doesn’t mean your content is poor. On the whole, eHow’s content is probably average to poor – but there are some very good articles mixed in with the good ones. And the same could be said for millions of ordinary websites, especially mom and dad style blogs.
For many website owners, especially those whose site is their business and their livelihood, the only way forward is to engage a professional to undertake an audit of their SEO strategies. Businesses tend to get caught up in these updates, often unintentionally, but the end results could cost them that business.
If you run an online business, particularly one that has hundreds or even thousands of pages, engage an independent SEO professional who can undertake that audit. Your website may be fine – but in ninety percent of cases, an SEO audit does pick up on errors. Who knows? Fix those little errors and you may climb even higher in the search rankings.
Search engine optimization is a process that is commonly thought to be about getting high search rankings. It is also thought to be about gaining as much traffic as possible from free (organic) search results. In a way, these are misconceptions. Let’s break each one down to see what SEO is really trying to achieve.
High Search Rankings – One misconception is that being ranked at number one is what everyone should be aiming for. This is not always true. SEOs primary aim is to position a page so that it generates the best traffic possible. Recent changes to Google’s Webmaster Tools has highlighted for many business owners where their best ranking is. In many cases, a business will receive more traffic from position two or three rather than from position one.
Traffic, Traffic, Traffic – SEO is not about gaining as much traffic as possible. If you want traffic, you can buy it by the thousands for pennies compared to the cost of SEO – but that traffic will be worthless. SEO is all about obtaining the best traffic possible. Targeting keywords that prospective buyers are using is just the first step. Giver 100 converting visitors to 1000 non-converting any day. In this case, it’s definitely not size that counts, it’s quality.
Search engine optimization should really be concentrating on getting your pages appearing in the best position possible in search results. It should concentrate on targeting the ‘right’ keywords that will lead to sales, not just any keywords associated with your niche. In a nutshell, SEO is all about delivering quality traffic and that means traffic that is ready to buy.
J.C. Penny, Forbes, and now Overstock – all suffering severe drops in search results because they had breached Google’s terms of service. While Google will have you believe they are on top of things, these large corporations suffered their search penalties because someone either reported their activities to Google, or because they create a big news story which caused Google to act.
It raises a question – would you report your competitor for breaching Google’s terms of service? I am sure there are thousands, if not millions, of online businesses that are frustrated because they cannot climb above their competitors in Google search. There’s the obvious way out – transfer your SEO efforts to closely investigating your competitors then reporting them to Google. I can see Google slowly sinking under the weight of reports if this situation occurred.
While a lot has been said about reporting competitors, we should compare the situation to that of offline businesses. What would you do if a competitor was gaining an unfair advantage due to illegal or immoral actions? Would you report them to authorities? The business community has done so for decades. While buying links, for example, is not illegal, it does run contrary to Google’s policies and those that do engage in this activity should be aware of the risks.
So what does the short-term future hold? Will the next growth area in SEO be an extreme form of competitive intelligence, who’s only aim is to find dirt on competitors? There is a real danger in this tactic. If you have been online for several years, can you remember what you did at the very beginning? Before digging up dirt on your competitors to gain an advantage, make sure you’re squeaky clean first. It could come back to bite you! Of course, with the three big scalps mentioned at the start of this post, it could be just the tall poppy syndrome at work.
We all know that Google is a strange monster. You can very carefully craft a page that has content that users will find interesting. You can work your search engine optimization skills to the bone developing good page titles and well-placed keywords. You may even go the extra step and write your own meta titles and descriptions for each page. Yet Google will take it upon themselves to create a completely new title and description if it doesn’t like what you have written.
In most cases, if you have carefully crafted your meta title and description, then Google will use it. There are a lot of websites around where every page has the same meta title and description – or none at all. When you check the snippet used in search results for these pages, you will often find that what Google has decided to use makes little sense – at least, not to the human mind.
The answer is simple. While there are no guarantees, Google will use your meta data if it has been well written and matches the search phrases used. What constitutes well written titles and descriptions? Not the overuse of keywords, that’s for sure.
There is a simple formula you can use to craft this meta data.
- Write a good title that is designed to catch the reader’s eyes.
- Write content that satisfies that title – whatever you do, don’t promise something with a title then fail to fulfill that promise.
- Write a description that really does sum up or describe your content.
If you wish to optimize the title, content, or description for keywords, go ahead. However, if you overdo the use of those keywords, you create two potential problems. The first is the raising of the spam flag because of overuse of keywords. The second is more important, and to an extent, answers the reason why your meta title and description are not used in search results.
Using precise keywords in meta titles and descriptions limits the scope of that title and description. With Google using semantic technology, you don’t have to stuff keywords in every conceivable place. If the content is semantically related to a keyword – and the best place to use it is in the title – then an open and accurate description should appear in a much wider set of search results. It’s something to think about!
There is a lot of jovial discussion around the Internet at present over the current public spat between Google and Bing. Google has accused Bing of cheating while Bing has accused Google of profiting from spam. From an SEO consultant’s perspective, we have been complaining of these types of things for years.
Does Bing use Google search results as a factor in its algorithm – probably, and according to Google’s ‘evidence’, definitely. No one has questioned or tested whether or not Google uses Bing results in its algorithm. They probably don’t, otherwise they wouldn’t have made an issue of Bing’s apparent use.
The bottom line is the user. Both search engines are trying to produce results that are relevant to the user. Unfortunately, both search engines still include web pages in their results that are outdated and/or not at all relevant to the search term. In the meantime, the art of search engine optimization is constantly being frustrated by the constant changes in the way both search engines determine ranking factors.
Bing’s call that Google profits from spam has been an issue for a long time. Those with poor quality content are always looking to get to the top of search results quickly and are quick to jump onto the next backdoor method as soon as one is found.
This is really the crux of the SEO – search result problem. It would be too much to ask for an algorithm that couldn’t be spammed, yet allowed the best results to constantly be shown to searchers. An algorithm that everyone knew, and could work towards to gain a front page search listing. But that would be too easy, I guess. Oh shucks, it’s time to wake up from my dream so I can catch the next installment in the search engine wars. There’s one thing I do know, this public spat is not doing anything to improve search results.
Are you chasing the impossible? When it comes to search engine optimization, many website owners are. They spend a lot of time, effort, and money chasing that number one ranking in the search results. Smart SEO is all about assessing your position and comparing it to your competition, then acting on what you can realistically achieve – the probables rather than chasing the improbables.
The number one ranking in search results is not a fixed rank. If you have Google’s Webmaster Tools tracking your website, you will find that your search rankings change, and frequently too. Search results now also take into account factors that are beyond the reach of search engine optimization – these factors include a user’s history. This means that, in some searches you are actually number one – or number twenty-one. You have no control.
If your analysis of your current positions suggests it would be hard work, time consuming, and perhaps costly to chase a higher search rank, then it’s time to change your strategy. You need to work on other factors such as your meta description, your landing pages, and perhaps even your social media marketing.
Your meta description may help you stand out from the crowd and so draw more clicks – even though you are only number two or three in the search results. Spending time on developing a good landing page may see you convert a higher rate of visitors – which would you prefer, more visitors or more sales? Social media marketing, of course, uses another channel to attract visitors.
Don’t chase the improbables – it can be a frustrating experience. Take a realistic approach and tackle what is achievable in the current environment. You’ll save time, money, and your sanity.
It’s amazing how a few words can trigger a train of thought a mile long. Seth Godin has a short piece on the art of juggling. So what does juggling have to do with reputation management? Plenty really. To quote from Seth’s blog:
Throwing is more important than catching. If you’re good at throwing, the catching takes care of itself. Emergency response is overrated compared to emergency avoidance.
Of course, it’s the last sentence that caught my eye (that’s his italics, not mine). You can apply the philosophy that response is overrated compared with avoidance to reputation management. Operating online with a policy of providing good products with a good service and you will develop a reputation for excellence.
However, what had me thinking was human nature. We do make mistakes, and they can sometimes be blown right out of proportion. Imagine a juggler that has been distracted for a moment – there’s a good chance they will drop the lot. And that can happen to reputations as well – take your eye off the game for a moment and suddenly your name is mud.
Unlike a juggler, you can protect yourself to a certain degree. By building a strong reputation early, it becomes harder to undo. Those that believe in you and your products will doubt any negatives until they can prove for themselves that what is being said is true. What is important in the reputation management process is to build a strong reputation in all the places you operate in.
This includes search results, social media, and your own websites. If you can develop that reputation from day one, you will lessen the chance of any stray incident or a disgruntled employee (or customer) starting a negative campaign against you. In simple terms – reputation management starts with your activities. Like a juggler, it takes constant concentration to ensure your business is doing everything possible to build and support your reputation.
With all the talk about social media marketing being the new king of traffic delivery, you would think it was the only method. In the cold hard light of day, most businesses still rely on search traffic, and they will for years to come. Social media marketing and search engine optimization complement each other, they certainly don’t work against each other.
There is an easy way to look as this issue – why chase only half the traffic when you can gain traffic from both channels? The number of people using search engines to find information is still growing, even if it is only slowly. More importantly, when you look at the volume of search undertaken each day, if you were to receive .001% of that traffic, it would most likely crash your servers – that’s a lot of traffic and a lot of search queries being run.
So, why is SEO still important? Search engines are still supplying traffic for free. The only cost to you is the time effort that you or a consultant put into optimizing your pages to rank as highly as possible in those search results. Do it well and your web site will receive significant traffic from the search results.
In many cases, SEO serves one further purpose, a purpose that many don’t consider. A good SEO program will ensure that your web site is put together in a very slick, tidy and well-managed fashion. Whether your traffic is coming from the search engines or social media, that tidy and slick web site will gain instant approval from visitors. Without the housekeeping that SEO demands, web sites would run out of control, will start to look untidy, and will most likely frustrate users who can’t find what they are looking for.
Search engine optimization helps your web pages to rank highly in search results. It also helps you to stay in control of your web site. Both are important if you want to be successful.
If 2011 is like any other year there will be fads that come and go, perhaps even some that come and stay. What has been evident over the years is that some have proven to be good while others have proven to not only be bad, but to run the risk of getting your website removed from the search index. If you’re good at picking the winners and losers, then you don’t need to read on. If you want to protect your reputation, then the best piece of advice to offer is to be cautious.
The problem with fads is that they come and go. Some fads hang around, but they can still be dangerous. Some of the more notable include automatic software – the type that seeks out blogs to leave robotic comments; spins a document and then lodges it with hundreds of directories; and the type that automatically bookmarks pages in social bookmarking sites.
If automatic isn’t enough, there are still a lot of individuals offering to do the same by hand. Oh yes, they ‘hand pick’ the directories, social sites, and blogs – but ultimately, it’s still spam.
This past year we have seen groups touting local search as a ‘clever’ way to game the search results. Claiming a listing in many locations around the US, even though you’re sitting at home in the UK, or Australia, or wherever. Google will soon find a way to filter those tactics, then hit those websites that games the system right out of the ball park.
2011 will see new creative ways to get to the top of the search results. If they sound a little fishy, then they probably are. If you have spent a lot of hours building your business, and building your business’s reputation, then forget any of the fads as they come around – use a little caution to see if they are valid, and acceptable by the Internet at large.
There has been a lot of discussion in various corners of the online world discussing the increased use of infographics. For those unsure of the term, infographics is the term used to describe the publication of data in an easy to read graphic. Rather than a table displaying information, it is converted into a pie chart that is well labeled and easy to see at a glance what a writer is referring to. But do they make good link bait?
Images are always good link bait if they are appropriate. If you have unique and meaningful research that the rest of the web could be interested in, then converting that data into easy to understand graphics serves two purposes. It makes it easier for a reader to understand, and because it easy to understand, easy to refer to on their own sites – with links, of course.
The Internet has introduced two things to our modern society – a thirst for more knowledge and more information; and a need for speed. Users want the information quickly and they want it in a format that is easy to understand, easy to digest, and easy to access. Well presented infographics enable writers to present their data in such a way that they answer both of those needs.
Just as importantly, infographics are no different to any other graphic. When well optimized for search, they will appear in search results. Create infographics that are visually appealing and they will most likely draw the attention of the searcher – and a click through to your site. Can you present any of your data in the form of an infographic? If you can, you may find it increases the number of inbound links to your site.
Can you have too much exposure in a set of search results? It’s an interesting phenomenon and most businesses would answer no. Yet I know from my own experience from using search that there have been times when I have felt a little overwhelmed by the results. Let me explain a little further.
Every business wants to rank number one in search results – that’s the general principle behind search engine optimization. For some businesses, that has come relatively easy. In fact, the businesses that dominate the front page of Google, for example. Enter Coca-Cola as a search term and check the results:
- Coca-Cola pay per click ad on top
- Coca-Cola.com at one and two in search results
- Wikipedia entry
- the Coca-Cola company site
- Coca-Cola images
Apart from the Wikipedia entry, that’s total domination of the front page above the fold. For branding purposes, it’s great for Coke. If I was researching this brand, my only options would be Wikipedia, to dig down a page or two in the search results, or (Google’s preference) redefine my search term. Of course, this is a brand name and you would expect a strong presence in those results.
Change the search term to just ‘cola’ and Coke still has a strong showing on page one above the fold, including a pay-per-click listing. Is that too much exposure? There are two ways to look at this. First – you are suffocating your competitors and not giving them an inch. A marketer’s dream. The second is that overexposure can harm a business and that a little competition is healthy.
What do you think? Should you aim for the ultimate total domination of the search results, or could that lead to overexposure and eventually harm your business? Would that pay per click budget then be better spent targeting keywords that you don’t rank so highly with in organic search results?
Google have changed the way search results are displayed and the new changes could make online reputation management just that little bit easier. The last modification to search results was to publish two related links on a domain for certain search queries. These queries include a search for domain by name, a search for a business by name, and a search for a brand by name. Google have now increased that from two related pages to a maximum of four pages.
You may wonder how that will help with reputation management. If your website is able to claim the top four listings, and you have a blog that is also able to take the next four listings, you will now have the top eight listings in search results covered. According to the Google blog:
As before, we still provide links to results from a variety of domains to ensure people find a diverse set of sources relevant to their searches. However, when our algorithms predict pages from a particular site are likely to be most relevant, it makes sense to provide additional direct links in our search results.
That variety of domains could well be your blog, especially if it is hosted on its own domain with the appropriate domain name. Don’t be surprised to see businesses now registering domain names using their business name with the term ‘blog’ or similar added to the end. We recently reported on an admission from Matt Cutts that exact domain matches rank higher than they normally should. Put the two together and you have two sites that rank highly for any searches on those domain names.
It’s only a small step since your reputation can be badly tainted in many other ways. Reports may not float to the top of search results based on your business name, but they could based on product names, perhaps a brand name, and through non-search entities such as social media. Still, every little bit helps, and this change will certainly go a long way to protecting a business’ reputation in the search results. All you need now is a blog that is ranking well – you do have one, don’t you???
Google have announced the introduction of ‘Instant Previews’ in search results and this could, over time, influence traffic numbers to many web sites. The feature allows users to preview the site listed in results without the need to actually visit the site. We all know how quickly web design can affect a user’s opinion of a web site. Put simply, if the user doesn’t like what they see, they will check out the next site listed in the search results. Are they going to like your web site?
All web site owners should, as a priority, check out their own web sites using the instant preview. Just enter a search for a term you know you rank highly on and click on the magnifying glass on the right of your search listing. While you’re at it, check out your competition as well. Put yourself in the shoes of an average Internet surfer – which site would you visit first?
Custom web design will become a key area in the future as web site owners try to outdo each other with striking logo designs and web pages that are easy to navigate and easy to find information on. One of the features of Instant Previews is that the section of the page where the search term exists is highlighted, placing it in context within the page itself.
What makes Instant Previews even more dangerous for those with weak designs is that a user only has to click on a magnifying glass once. From there the user only has to place the cursor over each magnifying glass to see a preview. They can quickly flip between a couple of sites before deciding on the one that suits their needs.
Logos will be important as will color and layout. The quality of your content cannot be underestimated given the focus it will receive for search terms. If you are running a business web site, have a good hard look at your web design – is it time to call in an expert to create a complete custom web design?
Of course, Instant Preview may not catch people’s attention and the effect on traffic and click-through rates could be negligible. While I wouldn’t panic just yet – I suggest you carefully watch your stats over the coming months.
Do all roads lead to Rome? Do all your online activities eventually lead back to your business? Should they? They are two important questions that you need to ask yourself and, depending on your answer, then check your current situation. Internet marketing has no limits – everything you do online is a form of marketing and the results could help or harm your business.
If you are online and working to build your business, then it stands to reason that everything you do does lead back to your business web site. It could be directly or could be indirectly, for example, from social to a your blog to your business – the ideal would be both direct and indirect.
Sometimes we get a little lost in the strategies we put in place. The end result is that other entities become the hub of our online activities. Social media marketing is a good example of this. Facebook has become a common hub with business owners linking their blogs, Twitter accounts and any other online activity such as LinkedIn. The downside to this is that traffic is then sent to that hub rather than your business pages.
For some businesses, this works well. They have well designed Facebook pages that are effective in driving that traffic onto their business site. For others, there can be a high decay rate between the traffic flowing to Facebook, and that traffic flowing onto their website. If you are in business, then your ultimate aim is to ‘do’ business. When engaged in a variety of online activities, the mistake that many make is to lose focus on that aim.
While it is fine to drive traffic too other entities, your business web site should always remain at the hub of your activities – that is where you want the traffic to eventually arrive since that is where you are making your sales. The bottom line is fairly simple – everything you do online can be related back to internet marketing.
Many search engine marketers spend most of their time chasing the elusive search engine ranking, hoping that if they just SEO their website enough then it will magically appear in the No. 1 spot on Google for their target search term. Unfortunately, it rarely happens that way.
You can rank No. 1 for any search term if you work hard enough. But will you make any money from that ranking? Bottom line: If your web page does rank No. 1 for an important keyword or search term but doesn’t convert any visitors to traffic then you aren’t any better off than if your web page doesn’t rank anywhere at all. You’re still making no money.
Quite frankly, you’re better off with a Page 5 search result that converts at 50% than you are a No. 1 search result that converts at 0%.
You might want to read that sentence again.
Let’s put it into raw numbers. Let’s say your No. 1 search result delivers you 5,000 unique visitors per month but none of those visitors convert to customers. Either you’ve targeted the wrong keyword or your landing page isn’t written for conversions. That’s a problem.
On the other hand, let’s say your Page 5 search result sends you only 10 unique visitors per month but converts 50% of those visitors. Now you’re getting 5 new customers per month. Isn’t 5 better than 0?
Even if your No. 1 search result converts 1 percent of its traffic, 5 new customers from 5,000 visitors is nothing to get excited about. You’re still only converting 1% of your traffic, compared to 50% from the lower ranking page. It’s all in the numbers, man.
Instead of focusing on search results, you should be focusing on building landing pages that convert well. Optimize them for search traffic, sure. But if you are focused heavily on building links and optimizing for keywords and you forget to optimize for conversions then you’ve wasted a lot of time. And money.
