Archive for the ‘General SEO’ Category
I’ve worked in search for just over 5 years now for Vertical Leap, and throughout my time in this industry, I have always followed solid processes in the management of all of the campaigns that I have worked on.
This process has massively evolved over that time, with more tasks required more frequently than at the start of my career, but despite the evolution of what the process is, it has remained at the forefront of how we manage campaigns.
By having evolved this process, what it enables us to do, is to ensure that all campaigns get a bare minimum of attention on certain aspects – either at the start of the campaign, when you are going through the initial setup stages, where there is a lot of work, to the on-going review and implementation of the strategies being employed.
It ensures that nothing slips through the cracks in terms of the attention each individual campaign gets over your time working on it.
The actual detail of each individual task is not part of the process plan. Every website we have ever worked on is a unique “animal”, with unique needs, be that from an on page perspective, or having very specific link acquisition needs. These elements need to remain flexible to ensure that you are delivering the service that each specific website needs as opposed to a “paint by numbers” SEO approach that may be delivered otherwise.
A good process here lets customers have an insight into what they will be receiving throughout their time with you. You let them know the reporting cycles that they will be receiving in depth information from, you let them know what keywords you are targeting and broad timetables to be reviewing the success of these strategies further down the line.
Our process also ensures that the people that manage their campaign get in contact with them on a regular basis. It’s all too easy to get blasé about the performance of a campaign looking at key performance indicators that search engine marketers like to review – be that link acquisition numbers, rankings achieved and traffic generated to the website. Hopefully they will be looking at online conversion metrics too!
But the real performance of a campaign is not determined by those managing it – it’s down to those that are paying for it to make that judgement! By enforcing regular contact points, and opening lines of communication to those decision makers, and forming relationships with them, it becomes a lot easier to gauge how successful search marketing campaign really is proving to be in the eyes that really matter.
If you are managing a handful of clients each with specific needs, and tailored packages, then perhaps a process for delivery is less important. However, if you or your company are working with hundreds of customers, then you need to ensure that all of those people are getting the same levels of service across the board, consistent quality of attention, and hopefully gaining positive results at the end.
The process makes this sort of approach scalable to greater levels and across a wider portfolio of websites essentially. Without having such a process when being involved with managing a large number of campaigns, it is difficult to ensure that you are actually delivering the same service across all of your customers. Some may get specific items pertinent to their needs, whilst others who equally need that sort of attention do not get that element of the service, just because the individual working on that campaign was not as strong at looking at elements.
Process is at the heart of everything that I do as a search marketer, working with a myriad of sites in a wealth of different industries. The detail of what is delivered to each client is absolutely pertinent to their needs, but without the fear that certain elements that need to be addressed get missed.
I have been around SEO for quite a few years now and like everyone else within the industry I learned the trade by running tests, reading blog posts / articles and speaking to others, to be honest this is the only way to learn SEO as it’s something that can’t be taught at a college or university. This seems to be the main problem, there are no rules or regulations surrounding our industry like most – we just choose to follow Google’s guidelines or risk losing our hard work.
Because there are no real rules and regulations many SEO companies have been set up by people with little or no experience expecting easy money, for example I had a phone conversation with someone in December asking me how easy SEO and link building was and how easy would is to get started within the industry – these guys really annoy me! how does he expect to run an SEO angency with no experience of SEO?
Are SEO’s To Blame?
Some SEO’s I feel are to blame for creating the minefield we find ourselves in, just take a look around some of the top rated SEO blogs / communities and you will see a great number of articles giving misleading information or information that could be misinterpreted – this gives newcomers to the industry the wrong message which then gets passed onto clients and can lead to them losing a great deal of money.
On top of this problem there quite a few spam sites setup offering SEO qualifications like “Search Engine Ambassador” stuff like this could edge a business to go for the “qualified” company instead of a genuine SEO company who could actually give them ROI.
What About the Newspapaers?
There have been 2 major news stories surrounding SEO, take the JCPenny story for example, this story in my eyes gives people the wrong impression of what we actually do for our clients and it could lead to many businesses running away from their SEO contracts.
At the end of the day what’s done is done and I feel it’s going to be a vicious circle of SEO newbie reads blog post full of misleading information, starts working for a client, client gets banned or sees no results, client rants in public spaces and the SEO industry takes another blow.
-Rant Over-
Most SEO tips contain at least one mention of the importance of ‘freshly updated content’, but what happens to that older content you’ve had sitting on your website for a while?
In fact, there are a 101 ways you can remove SEO penalties. Some of them are tricky, requiring you to understand the more technical aspects of blogging, while many are simple and easy to implement. The steps below can be applied in a day or so, by simply changing the way you blog.
There are times when aged content can be completely irrelevant to current topics or information provided. Yet removing that content may not always be the best course of action as we learned on Kitchen Stools Direct.
If you work things the right way, those older pages may give you the opportunity to leverage your search engine rankings. There are some ways to rework or retool these pages to give them deeper significance and enhance your SEO efforts.
Retooling Aged Content
Don’t make the mistake of thinking you should rewrite or change legacy content. This kind of aged content is often already indexed and contributing to the value of your current rankings.
Instead, consider retooling it by adding some related contextual links into the existing content that contribute further to your deep linking efforts. You may want to also add some new inbound links to that page from other pages within your site to give it fresh relevance.
Restructure Content
Restructuring the content you have on a legacy page is not as simple as just rewriting the words on the page. Before you consider restructuring anything on that page, look carefully at any potential anchor text that can be inserted contextually into the content that could lead to other pages within the site.
Updating old content to contain more current information is fine, as long as the original content itself remains quite similar. This will help to retain the trust that search engines have already placed on the aged content without completely destroying the SEO efforts you may have put into that page originally.
You can also restructure the content so that it can help you achieve a ranking objective for a different set of keyword phrases or terms within the same overall niche.
Renewing Relevance
What may have been relevant content three years ago may be completely outdated today. If there is older content on a site that no longer receives any search volume, it may be time to sacrifice that content in exchange for something with more relevance. However, don’t delete that page or you lose the contribution it has towards your current rankings.
Consider creating new inbound links with anchor text for this page from external sites to give the page a refreshed appeal within the SERPs.
Create a Hub Page
While the content on a particular page may be outdated or aged, the value of that page remains for SEO purposes. It can sometimes be worth the effort to turn that page into a hub page for other related pages within your site.
This can mean adding links to related pages within your site for suggested further reading about that particular topic. This can help pass the trust earned by the search engines from that page to other sections within the same site.
Redirect
If the content in question is out-dated beyond repair, you may need to sacrifice that page completely. However, don’t lose the momentum already built up by your SEO efforts for that page. Rather, put a 301 redirect to good use if you have the capacity to use a server side redirect from http:// requests.
This allows you to still retain the benefits of any inbound links to that page and continue the link flow, yet visitors will be redirected to a page of higher relevance or more recent information. In turn, that new page receiving the redirect will benefit from previous ranking status of the deleted page.
This was a post by Lior who is an online consultant for Kitchen Stools Direct, a bar stools and kitchen stools online store.
Google has recently announced that they will be adding a Facebook style voting system called +1 that will affect the rankings of search results while signed into your Google account. The system will work by people voting on their favourite pages online, these will then be viewable within your contacts search results – see example below.
In a perfect world a search engine that does this would be great – result sets that you can trust because it’s made up of websites / services that your friends trust and use.
The contact list for +1 will be made up from everyone on you’re:
- Gmail / Google Talk Contact List
- The ‘My Contacts’ group in Google Contacts
- People your following on Google Buzz and Google Reader
Looking at the list above its clear to say that there will be quite a few people that will be in these lists that you don’t want personalising results, especially if you’re an SEO – could make it easy to spot who is working with what client(s), here is what Google says:
“You can’t control who sees your +1’s because +1’ing is a public action. Anyone on the Web could potentially see the things you’ve +1’d”
Can The System Be Gamed?
At the moment there is only talk of this being implemented to users that are signed into Google and should not affect regular searches, but if we think back to the Google Toolbar ‘block result’ where they actually implemented it using the top blocked results its clear to say that the most +1’ed results may also be given more authority over time.
I was going to include Google’s view on how it will affect search results but it seems that the exact page I’m looking for has been removed (Matt Cutts tweeted the page yesterday) – basically it was talking about how potentially +1’s could be factored into the current ranking factors (without any mention of being signed in).
Personally I feel this could be another avenue that Google will go down and quickly backtrack on – here is what what Yousef from ElevateLocal thinks about the +1 feature:
“Google must find an innovative and seamless way to have people influence rankings, unfortunately +1 is neither innovative nor seamless. If it ever takes off and given the public nature of +1, it will be abused by spammers. Very soon we will notice a sudden surge of +1 tasks on Mechanical Turks. As far as PPC is concerned, I think +1 has the capacity to improve CTR significantly. “
If anyone else has thoughts on this please drop a comment 
Quite a bit has changed since I my Link Building 101 was published on SEOmoz – most of which still applies to this year but I thought I would take the time to list what I feel will be the important / unimportant link types for 2011.
Social Media Links
Google has admitted that it values links from social media profiles such as Twitter and Facebook even though they are no-follow (unless you put one on your personal Facebook page) but what about other links coming from what we would call social media profiles?
Personally I feel that any link coming from pages containing social media components will be valued higher by Google and possibly other search engines – why wouldn’t they?
Verdict: Important
Site-Wide Links
Since around November / December site-wide links seem to have taken a massive hit, this may be because it is one of the easiest link types for Google to crack down on when looking into link spam – Lists of links containing “money” keywords rolled up one after the other must be easy to spot.
Verdict: Stay Away (or use branded keywords)
Guest Blog Posts
Guest posting is a great way to get links and always has been – provide a great post and that post will get links from Twitter profiles and other blogs to help power your link.
Verdict: Important
Contextual Ad’s
Contextual Ad’s seemed to pop up quite a bit last year (some disguised as Banner Ad’s) and seem to work well for now but I think these types of adverts will be the next link type to be discounted by Google (if they can).
Verdict: Potentially Dangerous
Blog / Forum Commenting
This link type is usually associated with spam, if you do this properly and post a great comment it is more likely to stick and prompt replies from the community. These links are in no way powerful and will not help you rank on their own but they provide you with a good mix of natural anchors and nofollow links which can help build a solid base for other link types and create background noise around your website.
Verdict: Important
Directories
Directories have always been the bread and butter of link building – I’ve seen many posts over the last few months saying there is no point in these BUT people seem to forget about the hundreds of high quality directories out there – when submitting just keep an eye out for spam.
Verdict: Important
At the end of the day these are just my opinions on how important these link types will be to the search engines this year so it would be great if you could leave your thoughts too.
Scott and I, along with a few colleagues, attended Think Visibility at the Alea Casino in Leeds. For anyone who wasn’t able to attend this past weekend, I’ve compiled a small collection of useful links and resources so everyone can catch up on Saturday’s conference.
This may also be useful for those of us that did attend, but subsequently killed off all of their brain cells by drowning them in copious amounts of alcohol.
Presentation Resources
Learning & Earning Through Social Media – Mel Carson (transcribed by Peter Young)
Keyword Domains and Mini-sites – Gary Taylor (slides)
Using Social media for SEO – Lisa Myers (slides).
Submit your site for review with SEO, Design and CRO – Notes by Dave Naylor
Example Redesigns from Submit your site – Michelle Pilcher
Link Building in Real Life – Jaamit Durrani (slides)
The PR’s Guide to World Domination – Karyn Fleeting (slides)
How to Gain Ranking Dominance in Any Market Sector – Dave Naylor (Transcribed by Saurav Rimal)
Think Visibility live blogging – Kieron Hughes
Various Think Visibility transcripts by Dave Chaffey
Photostreams
Photos by Steven Lilley
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sk8geek/
Photos by Martin Cunningham
http://www.flickr.com/photos/martin_88/
Best Photo(s)
Both Steven and Martin took some excellent pictures (the back of my head features in at least a dozen) so it’s been hard to pick a single winner, so hard in fact that I couldn’t decide between my top 2. Here they are:
Martin’s
Steven’s
Post-conference thoughts and opinions
http://www.3ac.co.uk/think-visibility-and-domain-names – Gary Taylor
http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/think-visibility-september-2010-top-takeaways – Paddy Moogan
http://blog.pushon.co.uk/think-visibility/think-visibility-roundup-september-2010/ – Kieron Hughes
http://www.stateofsearch.com/think-visibility-–-a-love-letter-to-you/ – Annabel Hodges
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/thinkvisibility-sep-2010.html – Dave Naylor
http://www.smartdogdigital.com/blog/10-reasons-why-think-visibility-4-rocked – Illiya Vjestica
Unofficial ThinkVis Learnings – Parts 1 & 2
- http://explicitly.me/the-unofficial-think-visibility-thinkvis-learnings
- http://explicitly.me/think-vis-unofficial-tips-2-brand-failure
Thanks go to Dom Hodgson and the rest of the Think Visibility team for a fantastic conference and the best weekend I’m ever likely to have in Leeds. There will be more ThinkVis stuff making its way onto the interwebs and I’m bound to have forgotten something so if I’ve missed you out and you would like to be included in the list, send me a link on twitter.
Hope to see you all at the next conference in March!
